Offstage Lines
by Eatsscissors
Summary: Nothing can be taken without something in return being given. Eventual JackSawyer.
1. Chapter 1

TITLE: Offstage Lines

AUTHOR: Mari

RATING: Hard R

SPOILERS: Through S1

PAIRING: Jack/Sawyer, Sayid/Shannon, Jin/Sun

DISCLAIMERS: Ain't my sandbox.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: All right, I began to write this literally the day after 'Exodus, Pt. 2' aired. I wrote like a crazy person all summer, finished the first draft before S2 aired, and then threw it in a drawer and forgot about it for a while as I edited another Monster Fic of Doom. I started editing this one again in December. Therefore, any similarities that you see between this fic and S2 are based upon foreshadowing and coincidence, and the discrepancies you see are because I'm crack-addled and loving it.

Part One

John Locke was not a spiritual man.

When he told himself this, he did so with a fervor that allowed him to believe it, with the zeal of the choirboy who told himself that a reference to four corners and a view of the planet from a satellite did not have to be contradictory if he did not want them to be. Fate did not have to be a mystery. It could be a solid, absolute thing if only Locke could try hard enough, if he could find all of the separate puzzle pieces that would fit together to make it work. Make it make _sense_. Locke knew that he and Jack were alike in that regard even if they were alike in no other: they needed to understand, and they became very upset when their respective religions would not allow them to do so.

He was looking at one of the puzzle pieces at long last, Locke thought, leaning over the edge of the blown hatch and peering into the rectangle of darkness that stretched without end beyond that. This was his reward for his faith. His answers rested at some point down in the darkness where their flashlights and their torches could not go. He had been given a path towards understanding, and that was enough. To ask for it all to be delivered without trial, without struggle, and, yes, perhaps even without further sacrifice was unconscionably selfish.

Locke curved his lips into a small smile. It was gone too quickly for the others to see by the haloes of light thrown out from their lights. After all, the best games were the ones that required assembly first.

Jack and Hurley clustered together at the other side of the hatch, staring down with identical expressions of wariness and curiosity. Meanwhile, Kate stood at a distance balanced between Jack and Locke, her hands braced against her hips as she kept a restless stare moving across the jungle. After seeing that the ladder was broken after the fifth rung, she had lost interest in the hatch altogether and instead had become fixated on the recent visit that the island's most dangerous resident had paid them only a short distance from there. More than once she had asked if they really needed that many torches.

"Thought predators were afraid of light," Hurley had said, holding a flashlight in one hand and a homemade torch in the other, like a warrior carrying a sword and shield for battle.

"Predators with reasons to be scared of people are afraid of light," had come Kate's terse reply. Hurley had turned off his flashlight and shoved it into his back pocket without further ado. He had kept the torch, but from that point forward Locke saw him sneaking it frequent uneasy glances.

The boy leaned over Locke's shoulder from the opposite side, staring down into the same darkness that the rest of them had been gazing down for the past half-hour. The boy's stare was hard. After so much struggle, he was angered to see the sacrifice bringing so little in the way of answers. With the rest of the group there and watching, Locke could not tell him what he had realized about games.

"So what do you want to do now, John?" Jack spoke up from the other side of the hatch, the first sound that he had made for several minutes. The lady crossed behind him, her eyes flashing a brilliant and beautiful green in the low light. Looking at Locke from over Jack's shoulder, they seemed to be asking the same question. She trailed her fingers lightly along the collar of Jack's shirt as she went, and he shivered as if touched by a cold wind. Jack's eyes became unfocused for a moment before his expression once again became patronizing. Locke supposed that was understandable given the strain that they were all under. Even so, he saw Hurley lift his eyebrows and Kate turn back from scanning the jungle long enough to give Jack a disapproving look.

"I want what I've wanted from the beginning, Jack," Locke said. "I want to see what's inside."

Something in Jack's face tightened. Even if that was the answer that he had expected, Locke did not think that it was the one that Jack had wanted. Locke wondered if Jack was waiting for him to start speaking in tongues. He crouched down by the hatch's opening again and began drumming his fingers against the metal rim as he fell into thought. The sound traveled down into the opening and bounced away on an endless series of echoes. Bored, the boy wandered away to do whatever it was that he used to occupy the rest of his time. After one long, honey-eyed stare, the lady took herself elsewhere, too.

Jack stared at Locke, his eyes dark and hard, and as soon as he realized the game Locke lifted his chin in order to return the favor. The flash of pleasure that he felt when Jack was the first one to look away might have been childish, as was telling himself that Jack had started it, but Locke decided that he was hardly the only man who would have been unable to resist.

"We don't know what's down there, John." Another thing that few men would have been able to resist was the flash of irritation that Locke felt at the way Jack constantly used his name, as if by classifying Locke he could find some way of controlling him.

Jack was back to playing the staring game. Having already won it once, Locke soon grew bored and went back to staring down into the darkness of the hatch. He pulled a pebble from his pocket and threw it down into the shadows, where, like all of the others they had tried before it, it fell too far for them to hear a sound over the calls of the night insects and the noise of their crackling torches.

"I'm well aware of that, Jack," Locke said at long last, putting a deliberate stress upon Jack's name. There was a tension rising in the air that was only seconds away from making it ripple and pulsate. Hurley began to fidget, while Kate merely looked uneasy. "I want to see what I can see." Locke pulled his lips back into a smile that he knew was long past the point when it would have been a reassurance to Jack, and was only likely to anger him instead. He used it anyway. "Isn't that the point of science, to satisfy the roamings of the inquiring mind?"

Jack pressed his lips into a hard line. "I'm only interested in using to protect people." He left off the 'my' before 'people', but only barely. Locke had actually seen his lips convulse around the word before he managed to force it back again.

Well. Locke fought back an urge to tilt his head to one side. They had already cast away 'the' in favor of 'yours', 'mine', 'theirs.' 'Other.' Locke didn't think when it was all said and done that there would be much room left for 'our' at all. Watch how quickly they rebuilt society around themselves.

"You can keep your scientific inquiries." There was a hostility to Jack's tone as he finished that was strong enough to make Kate throw him another disapproving glance over her shoulder, while Hurley looked as if he wished badly that he had somewhere else to be. Locke watched it all and took copious mental notes.

He straightened from his crouch at the edge of the hatch, brushed the dirt from his hands, and looked Jack straight in the eye. Jack stared back rigidly, but Locke was no longer in the mood to be amused by games. "But wasn't that your purpose in finding a way to open the hatch, Jack? To find a place to hide your people?" If Jack was already thinking in terms of 'us' and 'them', then Locke saw no reason to do him the courtesy of avoiding it in speech. He stared at the opening that rose up out of the jungle and glared at them all, a dark, unblinking eye of Odin with all of the secrets of the original. "This is not going anywhere. If the Others have already arrived, then the rest of the camp will need to go somewhere very quickly."

Locke wondered if Jack had ever been on a Little League team when he was a boy, if he had ever lost so that he could learn to accept it. A tightness moved across Jack's face, followed by a sudden peace that made Locke momentarily uneasy, because he could not tell from whence it came. Jack threw a final glance towards the hatch. Locke thought that he might be fighting back an urge to spit down it. "There's no ladder," Jack said. "If we're going to go down, then we're going to need supplies. Rope."

"Yeah, I think I'm going to pass on that adventure," Hurley said quickly. They all looked at him. "Dude, I watched horror movies all through high school, okay? I know what the lifespan of the comic relief is." Hurley got a look that made Locke almost as uneasy as Jack's expression of serenity, because he could not understand it, and all that he wanted to do was understand.

Jack was already nodding. "That's fine." He looked towards Locke, his eyebrows raised, waiting for the cue that would let their dance of battling wills start up again.

The jungle growled, from a distance that was far away but still growing closer. Locke said, "We should move quickly."

---

Locke knew before they were within one hundred yards of the caves' entrances that something big had changed since they had left. In spite of the late hour and the darkness that most of the people on the island were only now beginning to recognize as every bit as dangerous as the day, figures were milling about out front, backlit by torches set out to imitate porch lamps. Locke felt his pace slow, and the other three rushed ahead of him. There was a bounce to Jack's step that did not know whether to worried or hopeful.

Steve and Tracy were sitting outside of the main entrance, arms around each other. They wore grins that had not right being there given the danger that they were in. "Jack!" Steve called out as soon as he caught sight of the doctor. "Hey, man, it's good to see you, if there's anyone who has earned himself a party-"

"What are you doing out here?" Jack demanded before Steve could finish, and the smile slid right out of Steve's face. Locke thought that if Jack could have actually reached down and shaken Steve without striking Tracy in the process, he would have. "What are any of these people doing outside? If the Others were to come right now, everyone out here would be picked off like babies in a park!"

Tracy stared up at Jack from her position wedged between Steve's legs, her eyes wide. "You mean no one's found you and told you?" she asked. "We posted sentries just in case something wound up happening, after all." Three people came running out of the jungle, waving their arms and shouting. Tracy's nervous look transformed into one of mild embarrassment. "Um. Okay, so, except for Sayid? We don't exactly have a lot of soldiers here."

Jack put his hands onto his hips. "Tell me what?"

Steve and Tracy stared up at him and, like small children at a party, soon became unable to hide their grins. "There are no Others," Steve said. "We're safe." He paused for a moment. "Relatively speaking."

"What?" Kate peeked around Jack, her eyes wide and uncomprehending.

"The Others! They're not real!" Tracy was so happy that she began to bounce against Steve's lap as she spoke. If the look on Steve's face was anything to go by, Locke thought that it would be a long time before he complained. "The French woman took Claire's baby and ran away with him-" Jack sucked in his breath sharply enough to make a whistling noise, but Tracy fluttered her hands at him. "No, no, it's okay! Sayid and Charlie brought him back, and it turns out that the French woman set the black smoke fire herself." Tracy continued to flutter her hands about until Steve caught them and lowered them back into her lap. "Her little girl probably died of natural causes years ago and she had to make the whole thing up in order to cope with it. I mean, after more than a decade she's clearly not about to try out for the cheerleading squad."

"Tracy," Jack chided.

Tracy had the good grace to flush and look down, tucking a few strands of walnut-colored hair behind her ears. "Yeah, sorry. I just…I have kids, okay? Back home. If someone tried to take them, I…" Her smile was shining and false from start to finish. "I don't think that I would be in nearly so good a mood."

Jack leaned down, looked for a moment as if he were going to squeeze at Tracy's shoulder in sympathy, and changed direction in mid-flight to pat at it instead. "No, you're fine. You guys enjoy the celebration."

"Make sure to pull up some fun for yourself, Jack," Steve said. When Jack turned back to look at him, Steve almost seemed to be embarrassed. "It's not a secret that you don't get a lot of it."

"Thanks." Jack turned to leave again, his step betraying for the first time how tired he actually was.

Kate hurried to catch up with him. From his place a few paces back, Locke heard her say, "What about Ethan?"

"Yeah, man." Hurley seemed glad to pass his torch off into someone else's hands as they reached the circle of light and crush of people that made up the caves. "French Chick didn't crazy a whole person into existence."

"I haven't forgotten about that." Jack paused before he had gotten more than a few feet away from the entrance and turned so that he could give Locke a wide smile. Locke smiled back and wondered if one or both of them was going to begin marking territory before the night was over. "The Others aren't coming, John. I guess we don't need to go into the hatch, after all."

Locke rubbed his hand over his head. "Not tonight."

Jack stared at him for a moment longer before he headed towards the place where Claire was sitting, guarded protectively on one side by Charlie. Charlie was sporting an ugly burn above his eyebrow that had not been there when Locke had left camp earlier that day. Claire's son was warding off sleep by kicking his feet and sticking a fistful of Claire's hair into his mouth. Claire and Charlie looked as if they were only a few steps away from following suit. Sun, who had been sitting alone nearby, rose to her feet as soon as she saw Jack approaching.

"Hey," Jack said, kneeling down in front of Claire. "Sounds like you had an eventful day just by staying home." He held out his arms for the child. "May I?"

Charlie made a snorting sound. "'Eventful' is a polite euphemism, mate." He touched at the wound on his head and winced. "Try 'gut-wrenchingly awful adrenal overdose' and you might be getting closer."

Claire passed her child over with a visible reluctance. "I've looked him over about fifty times since Sun gave him back," she said. "I don't…I don't think Danielle meant to hurt him, really."

Charlie snorted again, far louder and with much less humor behind it. "No, she only wanted to hand him over to the crazy people in her head." He put his arm around Claire's shoulders and squeezed her close. "You are far too kind a soul."

Claire took her son eagerly back into her arms once Jack had finished inspecting him.

"I examined the child," Sun said, standing behind Jack. She nodded towards Charlie's head. "And I cleaned his wound. Neither of them have serious injuries."

Jack straightened and smiled at her. "You did a great job."

Sun frowned and, finding a bit of fleshy something on Jack's neck beneath his ear, reached out to pluck it off. Kate went pale and said, "Um, maybe you shouldn't have done that."

Off of the curious, concerned look that Sun was passing around at all four of them, Hurley said, "Think about who left, and then think about who came back." Sun let out a cry of disgust and dropped what she was holding immediately, jumping back so quickly that she almost left her shoes behind. "Yeah, we kind of had that reaction, too."

"I'm going to wash up," Jack said, rubbing his hand over his face.

Sun nodded, staring at her fingers. "I will do the same." With a final glance towards Locke, Jack left. Each member of the group drifted off as well to let friends and acquaintances know that they had made it back safe.

Locke crouched down in front of Claire, pretending not to notice the look of slight wariness that Claire gave him. He extended his forefinger, and the baby abandoned Claire's hair within a second to grab at it. "I'm glad that he's safe," Locke said, and meant it.

Some of the uneasiness left Claire's face. "Thank you. I am, too."

Locke straightened and, patting at Charlie's shoulder for a moment, turned to look about the crowded caves. He found the person that he was seeking a moment later, sitting against one of the far walls and nibbling at a makeshift plate of fruit and small game. Sun came over to join her a moment later, and Kate pushed the plate over so that the two of them could share. Locke kept his distance until Sun realized that her water bottle was empty and rose to refill it.

"Hello, Kate," Locke said, walking over to her. "It's been a long time since you and I had a chance to talk, hasn't it?"

Kate looked up at him.

End Part One


	2. Chapter 2

Part Two

Sawyer had one thought as the first bullet ripped through his shoulder: irony had been waiting for a very long time to deliver this kind of bitchslap onto him. His thought as a second opened up a line of fire along his ribs on the opposite side: if he had to pick his poison, he would take being stabbed over being shot any day. That, at least, had not felt as if kerosene had been poured over his skin and a match held close to the flesh.

Sawyer's body was spun to the side by the impact of the first bullet, thrown backwards by the second. He felt nothing at all after, until cold water struck his back, closed over his head. Sawyer gasped instinctively and got a throat full of salt water before he remembered to close his mouth. The water was frigid at this time of night, but it did nothing whatsoever to stop the burning that rolled out from his wounds. Sawyer thrashed, trying to find the surface with no sunlight to guide him, and felt the water around his shoulder and abdomen start to grow warmer. Losing blood and losing it fast, in other words, as if the dragging, dazed buzz in his head wasn't enough to tell him that.

Okay. He had never done anything on anyone else's terms before, and he would be damned if this ocean was going to take him one second before he was ready. Sawyer stopped struggling for a moment and let himself drift, trying to tell from the change in pressure which way was up and which was down. Concentration drove the buzzing out of Sawyer's brain for the moment. As plans went, he thought that it was not half bad for one that he had come up with while losing copious amounts of blood. It might even have worked, had he not felt a hand closing around his ankle with a sudden, clammy strength, dragging him in a direction that was definitely downwards. He knew more than ever that this was not a place he wanted to go.

Sawyer could not stop the yell of shock that traveled out of his throat, costing him more air than he could afford to lose and sending even more water down into his lungs. No more could he control the spasm of his leg that jerked him away from that hand. Sawyer gathered up every scrap of self-control that he had left and twisted in the water so that he could see the hand's owner.

Joanna's face was swollen and bloated, like something straight out of the horror movies that he had used to sneak into as a kid when he was short on money and even shorter on places to be. If it were not for her characteristic smoky red hair, a shade so dark that it bypassed auburn altogether and came closer to black, Sawyer was not sure that he even would have recognized her. As it was, he wasn't sure that he still wanted to. Joanna had been wearing a bikini rather than her usual practical racing suit on the day that she had died, and all of that bare skin gave Sawyer plenty of room to see the business that the fish and the crabs had been doing on her abdomen, her legs. Her hair floated back from her face and let Sawyer see that her eyes had been eaten away.

Some deep part of Sawyer's brain, the place where instincts were stored, told him that if he gave in to the urge to hyperventilate now it would be the last time that he would ever do so. He used the last scraps of oxygen in his lungs to whirl away from Joanna as she reached for him again and swam as fast as he was able in the opposite direction. There might come a time when he would be able to tell himself that what he had seen was nothing more than a hallucination brought on by stress and pain and maybe even be able to believe it, but in the moment itself she was as real to Sawyer as his own two hands. Never mind that he was reeling so hard that he could scarcely even tell left from right any longer, let alone which way led to the surface, and never mind that he was running so low on oxygen and blood and in his state only a few steps away from outright panic did not know how he was going to get more of either in time to save his life. Sawyer did not even know where the gun had fallen, or otherwise he would have thrown a few wild shots back in the thing's direction and hoped that one of them hit something important. His priorities had in the past several seconds contracted to include one thing and one thing only: if he was going to die here, then oh please let it be before that Joanna thing touched him again.

Sawyer bit the inside of his own cheek until he tasted blood on his tongue when a pair of arms reached out from behind and wrapped themselves around him, so that he did not waste any further oxygen on a gasp or a yell that would go nowhere. He twisted like a cat in the water in order to get away from the owner of those arms as they dragged him inexorably upwards. He was fighting so fiercely that he did not notice that the hands were warm with the force of blood rushing through them, that the skin was not sliding about on the bones like a pair of ill-fitting gloves.

Sawyer wrenched free at last, so hard that he was certain he was leaving patches on his own skin behind in the thing's grasp. He balled his hand into a fist and lashed out as hard as he was able.

It was a wild, weak blow that Sawyer was not actually expecting to connect with anything at all. When your back was against the wall, he had discovered years ago, it was the fact that you continued to fight at all that usually counted for the most. For once, though, the universe was smiling at him, and Sawyer got lucky. His fist connected with something warm and hard that snapped back under the force of impact. Sawyer was dizzily congratulating himself on being able to give a little of his own back, at least, when another fist collided with his own jaw in answer. Sawyer's head rocked back hard enough to make his neck creak, felt his lips fall open far enough to let one final cold, gagging gulp of salt water slide down his throat. All right, then. That was it.

The owner of the arms closed them around Sawyer from behind again, pinning his arms back down to his sides before once again dragging them both grimly upwards. Sawyer kicked and squirmed, but he was done and they both knew it. When Joanna's compatriot slid his arm down to press against the burning furrow in Sawyer's side, he nearly passed out.

Sawyer did not realize what had really happened until his head broke the surface of the water and he heard a voice begin yelling at him angrily in Korean. He paused between sucking in deep, grateful gulps of air to wheeze out a laugh. Attacking his own rescuer, just like any other animal in a trap. If he kept this up, it was officially going to become a habit.

"Okay," Sawyer said, reaching back to pat at Jin's arm and let him know that he wasn't going to fight him any longer. "Okay, I get it."

Whatever it was that Jin was calling him-and Sawyer thought that he had a pretty good idea-he began to slow down. Sawyer leaned over Jin's arm to retch up the gallons of salt water that had begun to rebel on him. Jin slid his arm back down on Sawyer's side to steady him, putting pressure on the bullet wound, and Sawyer nearly blacked out again then and there.

"Oh, no," Sawyer groaned. "Oh, no, don't go doing that." He moved his hand, trying to push Jin's arm back into a position that wouldn't make Sawyer feel as if his own ribs had turned into vengeful knives bent on making him pay for some long-forgotten slight. Jin, not understanding and thinking that Sawyer was trying to fight him off again, tightened his grip. Sawyer sucked in his breath so hard that it made his teeth ache. "Oh, Jesus. Jin, buddy, I owe you in a huge way, believe me, I know this. But if you do not stop that right now I'm going to pull your arm off and add the rescue to my tab."

Maybe Michael's English lessons had been more extensive than Sawyer had realized or maybe Jin was only picking up on the whine of pain in Sawyer's voice, but he brought his arm up until it nestled against Sawyer's chest and far away from nerves that were now glad for the chance to dial down into an angry sulk. "Thank you," Sawyer sighed. Jin said something to him that involved a lot of consonants, and Sawyer patted at his arm. "Whatever you say, Kemosabe."

Sawyer turned his head until he was able to locate the raft, a burning conflagration floating an impossible distance from the place where he and Jin were treading water. It was a small wonder that his lungs continued to ache and burn and he had to pause every few minutes to spit out a new mouthful of salt water. "We are well and truly fucked, aren't we?"

Jin muttered something in a tone of commiseration that made Sawyer wonder if maybe ol' Charlie knew a hell of a lot more English than he let on and tugged Sawyer's shirt aside so that he could see the wound in his shoulder. His next words were not pronounced in nearly so cheerful a tone.

"Yeah, I know. It's bad." If Luck really was a lady, then Sawyer figured that he owed that bitch a smack to the mouth. He let his head fall backwards until it was resting on Jin's shoulder and focused on breathing.

After Sawyer finally went passive and quiet, Jin twisted around in the water and used his free arm to begin pulling them both back towards the raft in long, strong strokes. He was again the fisherman's son who had been scrambling in and out of rivers unsupervised since the age of four, and he was far more in his element here than he was in a world of propriety and threats hidden carefully in the pauses between words. It was a small measure of comfort, and in the shifting waves Jin thought that he could feel the last of that false person falling away.

Sawyer shifted and muttered something liquid as Jin's arm once again drifted too close to the wound in his abdomen, the bad one. Jin had peered at the entry wound in the flesh above Sawyer's shoulder and seen that it was accompanied by an exit wound on the other side. Clean, orderly. It was not the case on Sawyer's side, where Jin had felt the hard knot wedged into the ribs before Sawyer had pushed him away and begun yelling. Jin did not need Jack's education to understand the implications of that hard little knot.

The raft was still burning sullenly when Jin reached it with his charge in tow, the remaining bamboo being eaten up by flames one log at a time. It was hardly hampered in the slightest by the waves that lapped against the remaining logs and rolled them back and forth. The weeks of work would all be gone within moments.

Jin let a series of several obscenities slide past his lips and heard Sawyer grunt. His tone sounded like agreement. Given the right circumstances, a universal language was not all that hard to arrive at, after all.

"Michael!" Jin yelled when he was close enough to be sure that he would not be wasting his voice and his energy. The boat that had taken Walt was nowhere within sight, and even if Jin's voice was still within carrying distance he would not imagine that any of the people on board would be moved to care. They had taken what they wanted; though Jin's eyes strained among the waves for a small head perched atop a yellow lifejacket, he saw no one and heard no voice answering his calls. No answer from Walt and also none from Michael, and Jin could not help but think of the gunshots that had knocked Sawyer into the water and sent Jin diving in after him. Jin had only heard two shots before the water closed over his head, but that still left the people on the boat with at least four or five bullets to them. Michael was larger and more dangerous than Walt, Michael had a father's desperation to propel him forward long after most people would quit, Michael was not valuable to them in the way that Walt obviously was. Jin swore again, low and miserable.

Jin only let himself float in the water and mourn his loss for a moment before he forced himself to focus once again on surviving. Their chances on a fully operational raft might have been so small as to make a gambling man shake his head and walk away. Jin was under no delusions as to how much worse the odds became without one. He kicked his way over to a bamboo log that had broken free in time to avoid the flames and wrapped his free arm around it, keeping Sawyer hugged tightly to his chest with the other.

Even though he had by this point retreated into a sludgy semi-consciousness, Sawyer was still floating well enough to keep his head above water with a little guidance on Jin's part. Jin was glad of it. They had a very long way to travel, and already an insidious ache was beginning to travel from his wrist to his shoulder. Jin murmured a prayer in the direction that he had last seen Michael, glanced up at the clear, cruel sky in order to mark his position among the stars, and used the bamboo log to keep both himself and Sawyer afloat as he kicked them painfully back towards land.

The same cloudlessness that let him mark his position among the stars allowed him to see the predators approaching some hours later. Moonlight gleamed against the gray flesh as it rose above the surface and disappeared only a few seconds later. Jin did not know if this meant that he should take back his earlier comment calling the sky cruel or curse her for her deceit, as he was not sure which he preferred: to watch his death coming, or to allow it to creep up behind him without any warning whatsoever. While either way seemed destined to be quick, Jin doubted very much that it would be painless.

Jin spun around, watching the first fin drift beneath the water as a second rose to take up its place a moment later. It cut through the water in a lazy arc and then dropped back beneath the surface, leaving scarcely a rippled to mark its place. Whether it was the same shark taking an opportunity to play with its prey or two working in tandem Jin could not tell, but he knew exactly what they were after.

Sawyer had made a small sound of protest when Jin had spun them both around in the water without rising back to full consciousness. The movement had jarred open the wound in his shoulder, which had only stopped bleeding an hour before. Jin could see ribbons of crimson threading their way across the water, only to be carried away seconds later by the waves.

Though Jin was ashamed of the thought and dismissed it as soon as it occurred to him, as Sawyer winced and squirmed against his chest to find a more comfortable position Jin wondered if maybe the sharks would be leaving him alone now if he had just given Sawyer up as a lost cause when the other man had been fighting him so hard hours before. It was a mean and unworthy thought, and Jin threw it out almost before it had the chance to become fully articulated. He tightened the grip he was maintaining across Sawyer's chest in atonement, and Sawyer made another irritated noise before finally coming back to full consciousness. Jin did not need to see Sawyer's face. He knew from the fierce intake of breath that Sawyer was watching the same scene that Jin was.

A graceful gray fin cut though the water like a blade, coming even closer than the previous ones had. The rest of the body followed a second later. A small and beady black eye fixed Jin with a promise. When it fell back beneath the surface, Jin thought that its mouth might have already been open.

Sawyer spit out a word that Jin did not need a fluent understanding of English to understand the basic gist of. He had certainly heard the other castaways saying it often enough.

Sawyer jerked back hard against Jin's body. His leg spasmed, and he said the word again in a voice that could not hide the fear riding behind it. A moment later, Jin said a few quivering words of his own as he understood why. Something brushed against the sole of Jin's shoe, drifted away, and came back to do it again a few seconds later. It nearly tore the shoe from his foot.

Sharks had skin so rough that they could tear open human flesh and make it bleed without ever needing to resort to their teeth. Sun had told him that, Jin remembered, after reading it in one of her many books. She had glowed with knowledge, with the fact that it was now hers, in that magpie way she had of collecting new information.

Jin realized that the odds of his ever seeing that glowing and quietly self-satisfied look again were very small. He also realized that this was not acceptable. He drove his foot down viciously the next time that the shark drew close, not caring where he hit the monster so long as it was somewhere that would make it hurt. The luck that they had been sharing over the past several hours lifted for a second, as Jin felt his foot come down hard on something that gave way beneath the force of his kick. The shark darted away. The eye, Jin remembered. The one place where they might be called vulnerable. He tried to drag up any other facts that Sun might have told him, but he was afraid that even then he had not been paying attention.

This was also unacceptable.

Jin let go of Sawyer, who only sputtered once or twice before righting himself and managing to float on his own. He gave Jin a dirty look before he went back to watching the water for the next fin to break the waves. Jin ignored him, pulling the bamboo log closer to him and realizing how ridiculous the plan forming in his mind actually was. Slender though the log was, it was still much thicker than the fishing spears that he had been experimenting with back on the island, and Jin had no place to brace his legs and gain leverage. Not to mention the fact that he was dealing with a much larger fish. Jin took a deep breath through his nose and blew it out, wondering how much time he would be able to buy with this fool's errand.

Jin paused for a moment to study the log, which was roughly three feet long and jagged at the end, as if it had been broken away from a much larger whole. It was the closest thing to a weapon that they had, and it would have to do. Jin lifted the log above his head and struggled to tread water with his legs alone, praying that the moonlight would be enough for him to see, praying that he would be able to throw hard enough with nothing to brace his legs against and that the sharks would not grow bored with games and come in for the killing blow. Prayed for the world, it felt like, since what he was asking for was essentially a series of miracles.

A dark shape circled in the water directly beneath Jin's legs, darker than sin and barely discernible from the surrounding blackness. 'This is not the first time that you have caught a fish,' Jin thought. He almost gave way to panicky laughter as he realized his own understatement. He forced the jagged end of the bamboo down beneath the surface of the water, to where a monster waited…

…and watched as the shark whirled away from it at the last possible second, sending the log glancing harmlessly off of the animal's side before it wrenched out of Jin's hands and bobbed back up to the surface. Jin set his teeth together as he watched their best-their only, slim though it might have been-chance float several yards away and then rest there, kicked gently to and fro by the current. The shark, realizing that its prey's teeth were marginal, spun around for another try. Sawyer spit out that word again and moved back towards Jin as a second fin joined the first. Jin held his breath and waited to feel rows upon rows of serrated teeth biting first into his leg, then is abdomen.

The outlines convulsed suddenly and sped away without warning. Jin expected, irrationally, that he would feel electricity running through the water a second later. Surely there was nothing else that could have frightened sharks away from the scent of fresh blood. He looked towards Sawyer, who only shook his head, his whole body speaking of the need to sag against something in relief. Jin noticed that there were dark circles spreading beneath Sawyer's eyes and that the shoulder of his shirt was once again dark with blood. He bade Sawyer in Korean to stay where he was, using gestures to make sure that the message made it through, and swam slowly in the direction of the log. Sawyer had given up on treading water by the time that Jin returned and was floating on his back instead, kicking out with his legs or his good arm whenever he began to sink. Jin gathered Sawyer's unresisting form to his chest and turned them once more towards shore.

Sharks did not lose interest without warning when they scented fresh blood in the water. Likewise, if a drowning man fought his rescuer it was a clinging, panicky attempt to climb on top and use the rescuer for buoyancy, not a struggle to get away. Jin did not know where either of these thoughts would lead him if he were to follow them to their ultimate conclusion, and he told himself that he did not need to know more. All that he needed to know was which way land lie and how quickly he could reach it.

They used the log to keep them afloat as they swam, Sawyer clinging to it with his good arm when he was conscious and Jin holding him to his chest when he was not. Jin kept a constant eye on the horizon, watching for the return of fins that never arrived. When the island came back into sight in the predawn horrors, Jin nearly wept, and he did weep when he felt sand shifting beneath his feet again as the midmorning sun beat down on his head. Jin dragged Sawyer and himself up past the tidal line, laid his burden down on the sand, and, collapsing beside him, slept.

End Part Two


	3. Chapter 3

Part Three

It was some of the worst pain that Sawyer had felt in his life, and he was grateful for it. Pain was something that he could deal with, pain was a friend of his from way back, from before he had more than peach fuzz across his cheeks and faked a deep voice to impress the little girls. It was the still being around to feel anything at all that Sawyer was glad of. That was what was shiny and new, forged so recently that it was still too hot for him to examine as closely as he would have liked. As he lay on the sand, Sawyer wondered if there was a singular event that he would cling to mark this transition or if it had been creeping up on him for weeks, moving so slyly and subtly that he had not noticed until it had taken him, shaken him, and given him no choice.

Hearing someone moving about on the beach nearby, Sawyer opened his eyes. The sun was brilliant and vicious, zeroing in upon its new victim and doing its best to burn his eyes right out of his skull. Sawyer could not suppress his groan as he turned his face away.

Jin raised his head when he realized that Sawyer was awake and said something. The words were strung together so closely that Sawyer would not even have known he was listening to Korean if he had been hearing it for the first time, let alone have any hope of understanding it. Sawyer lifted his good arm and waved it in Jin's direction for a moment before even that movement tired him and he had to let it drop back on the sand. "Okay, okay, lay off. You could be reciting Betty Crocker recipes at me and I wouldn't know the difference." Sawyer's tongue was fat and swollen, sticking to the roof of his mouth and making even simple words difficult. He rested for a moment longer before raising his arm once more to act as a shield for his eyes so that he could see what Jin was doing.

A few pitiful scraps of the raft and the supplies that they had taken had washed back to shore with them. Jin was crouched over them, carefully separating the useless pieces from those that were salvageable. One pile was already much larger than the other. Sawyer saw a great deal of broken wood, a few pieces of soggy fruit, and-there was a God in heaven, it didn't matter if He spent most of his time kicking Sawyer in the ass, at this point Sawyer was willing to forgive him for damned near anything-three glistening bottles of water. Every cell in his body shrieked in unison upon catching sight of them, and Sawyer heard himself making a sound that he would only realize later had been pure, unfettered want. Even if his mind had had the time to keep up before he reacted, Sawyer did not think that he could have stopped the quick jerk of his body towards that water. His ribs and shoulders exploded in unison as soon as he moved, brilliant sunbursts of pain that made him cry out and shrink back on himself a moment later. Great almighty God, he would almost take being tied to that tree again if it would get rid of this. That pain had been greater in intensity, but so much shorter in duration.

Jin made a soft noise of concern and came over. Sawyer heard the sand shifting beside his head, and then Jin lifted it up and tilted the mouth of the water bottle to Sawyer's lips. His didn't respond until he tasted the first few drops of water crawling across his tongue, sinking into cracked skin and reminding it that it had once been alive. Sawyer grunted and jerked towards the bottle, unable to stop himself in spite of the pain that rolled down from the crown of his head to his kneecaps and was nearly strong enough to make him pass out. Animals could smell water from miles away, he knew, and now he knew that it was also true of humans, if they were dehydrated badly enough and all of the salt in their body had migrated into their tongue. It was a metallic scent, sharp as wire and irresistible. Sawyer grabbed at Jin's wrist to keep him from taking it away. Jin said something and pulled the bottle from Sawyer's lips only to place it back a moment later. He continued this process until Sawyer understood that he was only to drink in sips, but it was hard. He licked his lips, spat salt off to the side, and tried not to swear at Jin too much.

Jin pulled the bottle away for good after Sawyer had consumed half of the water inside, screwing the cap back on and carefully setting it to the side. His tone was comforting even though Sawyer could not understand the words. Sawyer closed his eyes, felt the sun beating down on the outsides of the lids. Memories of the night before began to float back to him in irritating fragments, never enough for him to form a coherent narrative. Sawyer winced as he tried to squirm away from the sand working its way into his shoulder from the back, replaying the way that the wound had felt seconds after he got it.

"Michael?" Sawyer asked, feeling his voice rasping in his throat. He opened his eyes long enough to see Jin shake his head before he let them fall closed again. "And the kid?" When several seconds went by without an answer, Sawyer rallied his strength enough to force his eyes open one more time and saw Jin looking confused. Sawyer fluttered his hand through the air as he tried to find the words. "Walt? Little guy, last seen in a yellow lifejacket? Kind of an argumentative little shit?"

Jin's face cleared for a moment at the mention of Walt's name, before a shadow passed over it. Sawyer's fingers convulsed in the sand, seeking the gun that had been lost in the drink along with just about every other useful thing they had. Well, he and Jin seemed to share a dim view of people who kidnapped ankle biters. A few more striking similarities like that and they would be able to star in their own buddy cop movie.

Jin spit out something that sounded fierce. Sawyer nodded in what he hoped were the right places and winced when his head pounded like an overzealous kid with his first set of drums was trapped in it. "If that was an imaginative revenge plan, then count me in, buddy." Sawyer dropped his head back onto the sand and extended his fingers in the A-OK sign. "I might just be a spectator, but it's the thought that counts." He felt Jin tugging at his shirt again, moving the fabric aside so that he could see his shoulder. "Frisky fella." It was probably a good thing that Jin did not understand English, Sawyer realized, or he might just leave Sawyer on the sand and save himself. As long as he could keep talking, though, Sawyer would know that he wasn't dead yet.

Jin's sharp intake of breath made Sawyer force his eyes open one more time. "Jesus," he breathed. A neat hole had been opened up in the meaty expanse of flesh above his collarbone, and he could feel another, less neat hole on the opposite side. The wound was still oozing blood sullenly. Sawyer was glad that it was only blood. He wasn't ready yet for that big trip that Jack had promised him while they fought over the briefcase weeks before. And that wasn't even the bad one.

Jin left Sawyer's shoulder alone and pulled his shirt up and over his ribs, grimacing as fresh blood made the fabric stick to the skin. Sawyer felt like telling Jin that he wasn't the only one feeling just a mite queasy here, but for once words failed him. The second bullet had not scored a direct hit on his side, at least, but had instead left an ugly, blood-filled furrow across the flesh before it had disappeared beneath the skin. There was a hard knot barely visible a few inches after the place where it vanished, the area around the entry wound was blackened and bruised, and Sawyer ached every time that he drew a breath. He had been in enough brawls and experienced enough broken ribs to understand now that his act of defiance against the Others had earned him a matching set, at the very least. Off of Jin's alarmed look, Sawyer muttered, "Yeah, I know. What I wouldn't give for a fully stocked medicine cabinet right now, huh?"

Jin said something and pointed to the bulge on Sawyer's ribs, where the bruises were at their most painful. Sawyer blinked rapidly as he stared at the place where the bruising was nearly as dark as his shirt, feeling as if there was something that he should be remembering. The water had been very dark…and that was it. Sawyer shivered and rubbed at the place on his jaw where Jin had socked him one. There was a bruise on Jin's chin where Sawyer had punched him first, so Sawyer supposed that he had had that one coming.

Jin caught Sawyer's eye, pointed at the place were the bullet was wedged, and made a cutting gesture through the air with his hand. Sawyer felt his eyes widen. "Uh-uh, cowboy, I don't think so." He sat up and braced his elbows in the sand so that he could scoot away. He probably would have been a lot more convincing if all but the very slowest of movements was not making him sick to his stomach. "We don't have a knife and you ain't the doc, got it? So let's leave the field medicine to the movies." He gestured towards the supplies that Jin had managed to salvage from the wreck, then at the rapidly sinking sun. "We should start heading back towards camp if we're gonna." Even though a drop of alcohol had not passed Sawyer's lips since Boone had died, he still felt heavy and drunk. He hoped that Jin didn't mind hauling just a little bit farther.

Jin nodded in understanding of the gesture, at least, and said something that Sawyer decided to interpret as the Korean version of, "Man, you're messed up." "You don't know the half of it, buddy." He watched as Jin bundled up in their small supplies in the remains of a shirt so torn that Sawyer didn't know which one of them that it had originally belonged to. Jin left one of the sleeves dangling free so that he could throw the bundle over his shoulder like children did with their books in old movies. When that was arranged to his satisfaction, Jin stood and extended his free hand to help Sawyer back to his feet. Sawyer gripped back with his right hand, already gritting his teeth against the extra special fun ride that he already knew he was in for.

Jin tugged Sawyer up to his feet much faster than Sawyer had been prepared for. Two nuclear bombs went off in swift succession against Sawyer's ribs: the first when he stood, the second when he staggered and banged into Jin's side. Sawyer set his teeth together hard enough to make his jaw creak and refused to make any more than the softest, most guttural of sounds. Hell, if he started yelping every time that he was hurt at this point he would never shut up.

Jin said something in a worried voice as he took Sawyer's good arm and placed it around his shoulders. Sawyer shrugged and then closed his eyes as that did not prove to be one of the smartest moves that he could have made. "Sure thing, Kemosabe. Aspirin and a cheeseburger sounds great right about now." He leaned heavily upon Jin as they started off, only balking when he realized that Jin was taking them into the looming jungle. Call him crazy, but he had the sneaking suspicion that the place with a reputation for eating people was not the place for him to be while he was still leaking blood from fresh wounds.

Jin stopped when Sawyer did and made a face suggesting that he was trying very hard to maintain his patience, but Sawyer was making it more difficult than he had anticipated. Well, good for Jin. If they used this nightmare to learn and grow and sing 'Kum By Yah', then Sawyer would _know_ that they had entered the Twilight Zone with no hope of ever coming out again.

And speaking of the strange and unlikely…Sawyer frowned as a fragment of memory flitted through his brain, moving quickly and refusing to stand still so that he could get a good look at it. Whole damned night was filled with gaps like that, like pages torn out of a book, and he was only glad that he could still put the beginning and ending of the story together well enough to get the basic gist. Others? Bad news. Walt? Gone. Situation? From where he was standing, all fucked up.

Sawyer fought back an impulse to rub at his ankle, which made no sense at all, and muttered, "But sharks don't act like that," which at least did. Maybe. If he tilted his head to the side and squinted at it just right.

Jin was still staring at him, his expression growing more irritated with every passing second. He said something that involved relatively few syllables and a great number of consonants before he pointed first at the beach, then at the jungle, and finally up to the sun itself. Sawyer wasn't getting it. He hoped that the misunderstanding rested in the fact that he was so far gone at this point that even with Jin's help he was still swaying on his feet.

Jin repeated the gestures first once, then again. "Oh," Sawyer said as he finally made the connection. The sun. They were probably already a nicely charred pair as it was, and only hurting so badly from everything else that they had not had time to notice yet. Sawyer still wasn't sure that he wanted to trade in a nice bronzed glow for the chance to be eviscerated, but he figured that it was a good idea to let the man who still had a full seven pints of blood in him make the decisions.

Jin led them into the shadowy trees, where they stayed deep enough under the foliage to avoid becoming burned any further but still close enough to the beach to use it as their guide. Sawyer sure hoped that Jin knew what he was doing, because he had never seen this stretch of coastline before. It was a big damned island, after all, and they had all been so fixated upon rescue that they had barely stirred from the little stretch of earth running from the beach up to the caves.

Sawyer glanced towards Jin, who had his eyes cast downwards and his face set into lines of deep concentration, clearly not in the mood for conversation even if there had not been a language barrier between them. He would just have to rely on Jin's better judgment as much as he was relying on Jin's legs, then. Never mind that having to be dependent upon anyone for this length of time at a stretch was playing havoc on his nerves when he all that he really wanted to do was lay his body down on the earth and sleep.

'Get to Jack,' Sawyer told himself, turning it into a mental sing-song. Children's nursery rhymes were always the easiest to remember, always the bizarre little songs that stayed after everything else had been stripped away. 'Get to Jack, get to Jack, get to Jack.' He would carry that closer than any fairytale story, he would let it fuel him forward and he would not wonder when those words had acquired such power. Get to Jack, and don't worry that the Others might have killed him and everyone else at the camp by the time that Sawyer and Jin made it back. Get to Jack, and don't think about the creepy-nasties that were probably already crawling around in those brand new wounds. Get to Jack, and don't worry about when he had started caring about living and dying at all, rather than only worrying about whether or not it was prolonged.

Get to Jack, and don't dare let his mind turn towards how deeply, how powerfully, he had failed that kid. Sawyer shuddered to think of what could be happening to Walt now.

Get to Jack, and…get to Jack.

Sawyer once again froze in his tracks. Jin, having learned from the last time that Sawyer had tried that trick, kept tugging him inexorably forward until Sawyer came back to reality and began walking on his own again. The same sense of unshakeable duty that had driven Jin and Michael to build a raft from nothing would not allow him to leave someone behind now. Sawyer hated being turned into a project as much as he always had, but at the moment there was not a whole heaping load that he could do about it. Sawyer exhaled through his nose and focused all of his energy on putting one foot in front of the other, struggling to keep the pain down to a low enough level so that he would not pass out. Let that epiphany sit dormant right where it was until he had the energy to deal with it again.

Sawyer wheezed out a laugh that earned him another worried look from Jin. Yeah, he kept piling those things up, didn't he? Maybe if he survived long enough to get back to the camp he would be in traction long enough to finally sort through all of them.

Sawyer thought of the Others and how easily they had carted off Walt. If there was still a camp to return to, anyway.

He was still digesting that cheerful thought when the ground began to rumble beneath his feet. A metallic sound that made Sawyer think of county fairs and summer days began to rumble through the air. He hung his head down between his shoulder blades and laughed as hard as his cracked ribs would allow. Jin hissed something at him that Sawyer figured translated to roughly, "Shut up, you damned fool," until Sawyer forced himself to stop snickering and be silent again. Of _course_ that thing would show up now, what else could possibly make the adventure any more perfect?

The clanking grew louder. Sawyer really doubted that there was going to be cotton candy and carnival rides when that critter arrived. He threw a longing look back towards the open beach, but Jin dragged them quickly down into the protective growth that covered the forest floor. So wide open spaces were ruled out. Got it. Sawyer didn't see how cowering in the thing's hunting grounds was going to do them any favors, but what the hell. Jin wasn't the one so tired and battered that he was having trouble keeping his thoughts going in one straight line.

"Been a while since we've heard from that nasty, anyway," Sawyer muttered. "Probably long overdue for a visit." Jin shook his head at him, and Sawyer drew his finger across his lips in a quick zipping gesture. He was still leaking enough blood to serve as a neon beacon to every predator within a ten-mile radius, but sure, he would play the quiet game if that was what Jin wanted.

They shrank back into the ferns, and Sawyer hoped like hell that the undergrowth was lush enough to keep them camouflaged. They were sure out of places to run if it wasn't, though Sawyer supposed that they could always pray for it not to be hungry. The metallic noise had become so loud by that point that it was making Sawyer's ears rib and his head throb, but it also made him realize that he had never heard the monster at so close a range before. When not being filtered across a distance of several miles, it didn't sound like it was coming from any living animal at all. More to the point, the closer it got the more it also sounded like it was coming from a place low to the ground. For a monster that from all accounts was known to habitually rip trees from the ground and throw them at people, Sawyer thought that was pretty damned interesting.

He raised his brows at Jin, who stared back at him with widened eyes. Nothing like this had ever happened near the camp. Even with their piss-poor communications skills, this news would have torn through them at wildfire speed. Sawyer inched further back into the undergrowth, trying along with Jin to make himself as small and unobtrusive as possible.

Get to Jack, and let him know that crazy didn't cover half of the things that had been going on on the island since they had crashed.

It buzzed. Sawyer cocked his head to one side and felt his eyebrows drawing together. The last time that he had heard a noise like that, he had been very young and still living in his aunt's house. It had been a blistering summer day, the kind where even the air was too lethargic to move. Lisa had been shuffling about in the kitchen as she tried to find something for dinner that didn't involve heat or even effort in any appreciable way, Oren had already been half-drunk on the couch, and Sawyer had been listlessly playing with his Legos on the living room rug, jerking away whenever Oren realized that he was a daddy now and tried to paternally ruffle his hair. There had come a buzzing in all the vents of the house at the same time, loud enough to drive Lisa from the kitchen in fright at the same time that Oren had jumped up from the couch. Lisa had tried to pull Sawyer-still James, then-to her, but even at that age he had had little use for comforting.

It wasn't until Sawyer's hand began to ache that he realized he was on the verge of cutting his palms open with his own fingernails, so tightly were his hands clenched into fists. And the moral of that fun little trip down memory lane? The neighbor down the road had run a couple of commercial beehives out of his backyard until his kids got to horsing around one day and smashed one of them. Homeless and desperate to escape the heat, the bees had swarmed over to Lisa and Oren's house, climbed down inside the walls, and decided that they liked it there just fine. It had taken three visits from an exterminator and two screaming matches with the neighbor to get rid of them again.

But they had made a sound exactly like that.

"I know what it is," Sawyer whispered, so stunned that he could barely get the words out. Jin shook his head at him in warning.

The buzzing and the clanking grew louder in unison, until Sawyer was at long last able to get his first real glimpse of the thing that had kept them all running scared ever since they had first taken their nosedive into this godforsaken place. It wasn't ripping up trees or throwing bodies through the air, so Sawyer figured that this was a good start. He also figured that he and the other castaways couldn't call the monster an 'it' any longer nearly so much as they needed to start calling it a 'they'. It, they, hell, Sheila if that's what made the thing happy, was a swarm of small monsters that collectively came to be about the same size as a city bus. Individually…Jin began to lean forward for a better look, making the ferns beneath him rustle, and Sawyer grabbed at his shoulder to haul him back. Sawyer squinted for a better view. Individually, he'd guess that they were each about the size of his thumb, but he wasn't brimming over with enthusiasm to creep close and take formal measurements. The little monsters were too far away for Sawyer to see if they were animals or some twisted kind of machine, but at this point he was pretty sure that the clanking and the buzzing were coming from two separate sources. When the swarm dove down an opening in the jungle floor that hadn't been there before and definitely was no longer there a second later, Sawyer was sure of it.

He and Jin remained in hiding for several minutes after the noise was gone, trusting the silence even less than they had the sound. Sawyer at long last exhaled a breath that he had not realized he was holding, turning his head to the place where the monster had been. Even if he was to get up and poke at the earth he wasn't certain that he would be able to find the opening, so perfectly was it hidden. More importantly, after seeing and hearing about what those things were capable of when they were working together, Sawyer wasn't sure that he wanted to until he had a lot more in the way of backup.

"Okay, then," he said at long last. "That's a message worth carrying back, ain't it?"

Jin helped him up to his feet so that they could soldier on.

End Part Three


	4. Chapter 4

Part Four

It was near sunrise before anyone at the caves wound down enough to sleep, and longer than that before Jack found time for it himself. As the first fingers of the dawn began to creep over the horizon in streaks of pink and gray, Jack tiptoed through the rows of sleeping bodies, taking great care so that he did not disturb any of them. He was experiencing some of the greatest exhaustion that he had felt since he had landed on the island, but settling down to rest himself was one of the farthest things from his mind.

Getting everyone moved up from the beach and into the relative safety of the caves had been a plan met with such strong resistance that Jack had focused on the 'if' alone and told himself that the 'how' could be worked out later. Then the 'later' had become 'now', danger had arrived, and the caves that had seemed so large with only half the camp staying there at a time now seemed a great deal smaller.

Jack halted his rounds long enough to settle down for a moment in a patch of unoccupied space against one of the far walls. With the rough stone bracing him at his back, he extended his forefinger into the dirt and drew a quick sketch of the caves' outlines, keeping the dimensions as accurate as he could. After studying his diagram for several minutes and experimenting with many various lines as dividing points, Jack sighed and scuffed out most of the drawing with one quick movement of his hand. Pictures in the dirt told him exactly what he could already see by looking out at the people filling up the caves and grabbing any sleeping space that they could. The caves were too small. For twenty people, sure, they had plenty of space and even room left over for storage, but not when the number climbed up to double that. Not if they wanted to keep from killing each other. It had not escaped Jack's attention that life on the island was transforming them into an altogether more violent group of people than they had been back home.

He sighed again and rubbed his hand over his eyes, tapping his finger against the dirt as he thought. There was no sense in putting off thinking about it any longer: unless the people on the raft pulled off a minor miracle, the chances were good that it would be years before they got off of this island, if ever. He would continue to hope for the best, but as long as everyone continued to look to him as the leader then it was also his responsibility to plan for the worst.

Jack's fingers continued to draw lazy circles as he withdrew deeper into his own thoughts, obliterating even the last remains of the careful diagrams that he had drawn moments before. All right, if he was ready to start settling down and planning for the long term, there were several places where he could start. For one, something or someone had killed Scott. Convenient as it might be to paint Danielle as the island madwoman, she did not have the strength to do that kind of damage. Jack wasn't sure that even he could have broken the man's femurs like that, let alone been able to subdue Scott and keep him quiet at the same time. The Others, whoever they were and whatever their agenda might be, were going to be a real threat to them, not just the island's answer to the bogey man.

Furthermore, if the ordeal of getting everyone up to the caves that Sayid had described to him proved one thing, it was that they could not keep sleeping out in the open and expect to survive. They could keep traveling down to the beach to fish and to feed the signal fires, but it was long past time that they stopped sitting about, blinking and wide-eyed, as the weak points that they never seemed to learn from were exploited again and again and again.

Jack looked down and realized for the first time what he had done to his drawing. If he could convince the twenty people who still refused to give up their last tangible sign of hope in rescue, he might even be the leader that they seemed to think he was.

And speaking of leadership…Jack began to draw absent circles with the tip of his finger again as his mind took up a new topic, one that he had been turning over there for quite some time. So long as he was making plans for the future, it was long past time that everyone gathered into a group and began putting some kind of order to the chaotic pack that they had lived in until that point. They could make plans to expand Sun's garden so that they did not exhaust their supply of fruits and medicinal herbs as they were in danger of exhausting the supply of meat, figure out a system of sentinels to guard the new camp wherever it happened to be, and decide once and for all who the leader was and how extensive his or her powers would be. Even if Jack already knew that the answer to that last question was likely to be him, he would feel much less like a third world dictator with a cigar in his mouth and a gun on his hip once it had been formalized.

Jack wiped out his doodles and drew out his diagrams one more time, lips moving silently as he memorized them. Well, all right, then. He knew what he needed to do.

Jack stood up, dusted the dirt from his palms, and looked around for Sayid. Admonishments about the dangers of remaining on the beach would sound much stronger coming from a soldier than from someone who repaired the damage once it had already been done. Jack didn't think that Sayid would be so adamant about staying at the beach after he had seen how easily their defenses could be pierced there and how difficult it was to evacuate everyone to the caves afterwards.

'For someone still waiting for their leadership to be formalized, you're pretty comfortable wielding those executive powers.' As grateful as Jack was to Sawyer for the gift that he had given him before leaving, he didn't think that voice was ever going to stop sounding like his father. He pushed it to the back of his mind.

It was another half-hour of tiptoeing through the sleeping bodies before Jack found Sayid. The sight when he finally did was enough to silence even Christian's beyond the grave whisperings. When he had last seen Sayid and Shannon the night before, they had been talking in a relatively private alcove in one of the far walls. They had fallen asleep there, their out-flung arms touching one another while their torsos remained far enough apart that they could pretend that it was accidental when they woke. Jack paused for a moment to watch them sleep before he moved on. Let them sleep a while longer; his discussion with Sayid could wait.

The sun had reached its midmorning point in the sky before Jack headed to his pallet to grab a few hours of rest. A few other people were beginning to rise by that point and put together fruit and leftover pieces of cold meat for a meal, giving each other sheepish conspirator's grins as they did so. And they had held that party without alcohol, too.

Jack supposed that it was only a matter of time before some enterprising soul began experimenting with the fruit in order to make wine, and then their parties could _really_ begin to get interesting. He found himself thinking of Sawyer, then, and how much delight Sawyer would take in being the island's only source of alcohol. Jack was amazed that he had not stumbled across a half-finished still out in the jungle yet, but maybe before Boone's death his supplies had still been plentiful enough that it hadn't been worth the effort.

Chasing his own thoughts, Jack almost missed it when two people started to slip out of the caves and into the bright sunshine beyond. Only Kate's bright lilt, carried to him on a stray breeze, drew his attention in time. Jack turning in the direction of the sound, already feeling the lift in his chest that Kate could still bring about through her mere presence. That pleasure was dampened when Jack saw who Kate was preparing to travel out into the jungle with.

Jack walked over to where Kate and Locke had paused to talk, feeling a smile that he only hoped looked less forced and unnatural than it felt crawl across his face. He looked Locke over. "I don't see any rope with you, John," he said. "Don't tell me that you're going to fly down the hatch."

Locke's smile looked a lot more natural than Jack was worried that his own must. Though neither one of them had moved, Jack still felt as though he and Locke were circling each other. "The hatch can wait," Locke said. He was a good liar. "We need meat."

"You're going hunting." It wasn't a question, but Jack still sounded incredulous. "With Kate." When neither answered, Jack went on, "Forgive me for being suspicious, John, but thing didn't turn out well the last time that you decided you were going out on a hunting trip."

Locke's look of regret was sudden and to all appearances sincere, so much so that Jack honestly did not know if Locke was telling the truth or playing out an elaborate ruse. "Boone was not accomplished in the woods," Locke said. "Kate is. From what she's been telling me, she might even have spent more of her life out of doors than she has in. I could use her tracking skills."

Jack glanced towards Kate, unable to stop himself from wondering why, out of all the time that they had spent together over the past several weeks, she had never told him the same thing. Kate even looked a little embarrassed, staring down at her feet.

"Yeah, well," she said finally. "Just say that I didn't have a lot of compelling reasons to stay inside while I was growing up." Even that admission sounded as if was dragged from her. The look that she cast in Locke's direction from beneath her lashes was less friendly than it would have been a moment before. 'Thank God,' Jack thought. He had been about two seconds away from pulling Kate to the side and asking her if Locke had flashed a bright light in her eyes or asked her to drink any suspicious juice.

"And if the island decides that it needs another sacrifice while you're out there?" Jack was not even pretending to smile any longer. None of them were, Kate included, and Jack was fine with that. It wasn't a smiling matter.

Again, Locke's look of regret and even a touch of frustration was so perfect that Jack could not tell if it was sincere or faked. He was thrown off-balance as a result, and he had to fight back an urge to shift his weight from one foot to the other.

"Sacrifice was a poor choice of words on my part," Locke said. "We were all tired and snappish, and I'm sure that mine was not the only bad decision made that night."

Kate's head snapped up. Jack knew that she must be thinking of how he had switched the packs so that he had wound up carrying the dynamite without telling her. A decision that he still stood behind, as one of Kate's first actions when she had thought that she was holding volatile dynamite was to break into a sprint with it still on her back, but he did not think that she was going to appreciate hearing that.

Locke went on, "Boone was in that plane when it fell because I asked him to explore it for me, and for that I am sorry. But that's the full extent of my involvement in his death. I didn't lay a hand on him."

Jack smiled a humorless smile and said, "It was destiny."

Locke shrugged. "Virtually every religion in the world believes in some kind of grand plan, Jack. So do most individuals, when you get down to it. I don't see how I'm any different from them." He peeked out of the cave entrance to make note of the sun's position before he turned back to Kate. "We're wasting the day. If we want to catch them at their wallows, then we're going to have to move quickly."

Kate nodded, but Jack took her by the elbow before she could move away. "If you don't mind, John, I'd like to have a word with Kate first." Locke tilted his head to one side and made a gracious 'But of course' gesture.

Kate's smile was exasperated as Jack pulled her to one side. "That was very macho. I'm proud of you both."

"This isn't a good time for jokes, Kate." Her eyebrows went up, but Jack scarcely noticed before he pushed on. "I don't want you to end up like Boone."

The smile dropped away from Kate's face. "I don't want that, either." She put her hand on Jack's arm and squeezed for a moment before taking his hand away from her elbow. The skin continued to tingle long after she had pulled away. "So I'm not going to let that happen. We need meat, Jack. We can't catch enough with snares to feed everyone unless we want to decimate the area, and with Jin gone it's going to be a lot harder to catch fish." Kate leaned closer to him and lowered her voice, even though the two of them had scarcely been speaking above whispers to begin with. "I haven't forgotten what you said, and I won't let my guard down." She tried to smile again. "I'm a big girl, Jack. It's been a long time since I needed someone to swoop in and save me."

"I don't think that," Jack said. A chance that he could not define overtook Kate's features.

"We need the meat," she repeated, turning to go. Her expression became far more exasperated than indulgent when Jack caught at her elbow again.

"There are a lot of people that I don't think need saving," Jack told her. "Does it look like that's kept me from worrying?"

The smile did not come back, but Kate's expression softened. "I'll be careful," she promised. "I might even be able to learn something useful. Consider me your own personal Mata Hari." Kate paused and closed her eyes as what she had said caught up with her. "Feel free to edit that last part from your memory."

"Already done." Once upon a time in the very recent past, Jack would have struggled with an urge to kiss Kate on the forehead in farewell. He reached out and squeezed her shoulder, while she placed her hand on his arm again. "If you remember that being careful is not your strong suit."

A shadow moved through Kate's eyes. "Already done," she mirrored Jack's words back at him. Kate cleared her throat quickly, and when she looked up again Jack was not sure what he had seen. She ducked her head and went to join Locke, still waiting patiently for her by the cave's entrance. They disappeared into the sunlight together.

"That looked intense."

Jack jumped and glanced quickly over his shoulder, sighing when he saw that it was only Hurley. "You startled me."

Hurley shrugged. "I'm quieter than I look." He followed along as Jack went to stand in the cave's entrance. Though he searched the trees hard for a flash of color, Kate and Locke had already disappeared.

"So…" Hurley began before trailing off uncertainly. When Jack gave no immediate sign that he had even heard him, Hurley tried again. "So, we're okay with Kate going off into the jungle with the crazy man now?"

"She doesn't need to be saved," Jack said automatically. He couldn't stop searching the trees, even though he knew by now that it was futile.

"…yeah." Apparently deciding to let the matter drop, Hurley turned to look back towards the interior of the cave as the sounds of an argument floated to them. Jack followed Hurley's gaze, saw a minor squabble over space that was seconds away from becoming a major one, and shook his head. He was amazed that one had not broken out already.

Jack started to head over and break it up, but Hurley quickly placed his hand on Jack's shoulder. "Might want to let it go, dude," he said in response to Jack's confused look. "Better if they just figure it out for themselves." Jack nodded and settled back, and Hurley pulled back his hand. "The caves seem a lot smaller now," he mused.

"Yeah." Jack shook his head. "It's too small for everyone to live here at once. I was thinking that we could move the beach settlement up her, recycle the materials to set up a ring of shelters around the caves, and use the caves themselves for storage and as emergency shelters whenever we have to deal with the Others." He noticed that Hurley was eyeballing him hard as he finished.

"So you don't think that the Others are fake." It was a statement rather than a question.

"Neither one of us think that the Others are fake."

"Guess you got me there."

They passed several minutes in a companionable silence before Jack asked, "Hurley, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?"

"You already know my first name. What, are you after the middle one now?"

Jack shook his head and even felt himself smile a little. "The hatch," he said. Hurley's shoulders were drawing up with tension, a movement so slight that only someone who knew him well would have been able to notice it. Jack was both gratified and a little surprised to realize that he counted as one of those people. He hesitated for a few seconds, waiting for Hurley to give him some signal if really wanted Jack to back off, but it never came. After a few more seconds of silence, Jack ventured, "You seemed awfully determined that we not blow it open before Locke lit that fuse. Any important reason?"

Hurley looked back out at the jungle, tilting his head upwards to scrutinize the dark gray clouds that were beginning to pile up in the sky. "It's going to start early today," Hurley observed before he turned back to Jack. "Have you ever had a lucky number?"

Jack blinked, confused. "Can't say that I have."

"Neither have I." Hurley went back to examining the sky and sighed. "Dude. Don't worry about it. The second that I think that it's important to the group, I'll spill my guts. You know that."

Now he was even more confused than when he had begun. Jack blinked again. "Okay," he said slowly, reaching out to clap Hurley on the shoulder. "Thanks." Curiosity or not, Hurley was entitled to his secrets. He certainly wasn't the only person on the island lugging around a suitcase full of them.

Hurley nodded once and even smiled a little as he turned back to the jungle for good. "I'll start testing the waters about your idea to move everyone up here," he said. "Uh, not that I can promise anything right away. It's a lot easier to pretend that we're at Disneyland or something back at the beach, but…" He shrugged. "Ethan wasn't a hallucination, was he?"

Jack felt his mood immediately grow several shades lighter. "No, he wasn't, and thank you." They headed deeper into the caves together as the camp continued to wake up.

Outside, rain began to fall, within minutes growing from a drizzle into a downpour.

End Part Four


	5. Chapter 5

Part Five

It continued to rain for the remainder of the day and most of the night, putting a damper on anyone's plans to move back to the beach now that the danger seemed to have passed. Jack made rounds through the crowd continuously and kept the peace as tempers began to fray, pointing out that they were all warm and dry, had plenty of food, and because of the rain had earned themselves a day in which they did not have to do any chores. The last part always encouraged a few appreciative laughs. Jack looked up more than once to see Hurley engaging in conversation with knots of two or three people at a time, often with varying reactions. Given that Jack had asked him Hurley not to panic people by mentioning the Others until they had more to offer than speculation, Jack thought that he was doing a fine job.

Whenever Jack paused in circling the caves, it was inevitably so that he could look towards the heavy, shimmering curtains of rain that were falling down over the caves' entrances. The objects beyond were obliterated into nothing more than shadows and blurs. The forms that Jack was expecting to step through the curtain-the one that he was hoping for-never appeared, even though it was raining so hard by then that he couldn't imagine how hunting was possible.

'If he hurts her,' Jack caught himself thinking over and over again. 'God help him, if he hurts her…' He couldn't come up with an action suitably violent enough to end that sentence yet, but thought that with the proper time and motivation he would be able to arrive at something. When the next morning dawned bright and clear and still with no sign of either Kate or Locke, Jack was sure of it. He grit his teeth and reminded himself that Kate was an adult, and probably a dangerous one at that. It was too early to panic yet.

Without the rain, there was nothing left to prevent a group exodus back to the beach. Sayid came up as Jack was watching the preparations for the trip. Jack glanced over. "Hey, Sayid. Haven't gotten a chance to talk to you much over the past few days."

Sayid looked over at Shannon, who had finished her own breakfast and was sitting on Boone's old suitcase so that she could give Vincent his. As Jack watched, she carefully pulled a piece of fish apart in her hands and removed every bone with a deliberation that Jack had seen her apply to few other things that did not directly benefit herself. When the fish had been prepared to her satisfaction, Shannon put it on the ground in front of the eagerly awaiting Vincent. Sayid smiled as he watched her. Jack was glad of it.

"I was rather preoccupied, yes," Sayid said. He glanced over at Jack. "Though not so much that I have not noticed how much of a stir Hurley has begun to cause."

"I was meaning to get your opinion on that," Jack said. "The longer we stay divided between two camps, the more danger that we're in. I know you were more determined that anyone else to stay on the beach back when the caves were first discovered, but…" Jack shrugged and made a helpless gesture. "That was over a month ago. Our best hope is on that raft now, and it doesn't matter where we sleep at night in order for that to work."

"We could have been attacked at several points on the path yesterday," Sayid said in a noncommittal voice after letting so long a pause go by that Jack had begun to wonder if he was planning on answering at all. In spite of the neutrality of his tone, Jack felt as if a victory had occurred. "There are also rumors circulating that you do not believe we are finished with the Others quite yet." Jack startled, and Sayid went on, "Hurley is a good administrator. People listen to him. He has not directly spilled your secret yet, but he is also not subtle."

"And what do you believe, Sayid?" Jack asked quietly.

"Ethan was real," Sayid said. "But that still does not mean that there is a conspiracy waiting to swoop down on us at any moment." He paused for a long moment, his eyebrows drawing together as he collected his thoughts. "Danielle…her mind is damaged so much that I do not believe she has any hope of coming back again. She says that she is the only one who has survived her exile. That does meant hat this is true, or that she is the only one who has been driven mad by solitude."

"Is that the best that I'm going to get?" Jack asked.

"I'm listening," Sayid said. "Until I hear more than theories and conjecture, however, I cannot change my mind."

"Thank you." Jack watched as Sayid made his way over to where Shannon was still sitting. She had finished feeding Vincent and was burying the bones in the dirt, pushing the dog's head away when he tried to nose at them. Shannon dusted the remaining fish flakes from her hands and gave Sayid a hopeful, almost shy smile as he drew close to her. Sayid picked up Shannon's suitcase for her, while she picked up Boone's and gathered Vincent's leash from where she had been letting it trail in the dirt.

Jack watched them leave the caves together before he muttered beneath his breath, "I was not meant to be a politician."

Sun was helping Claire tend to Aaron while Charlie packed up their things, so absent anything else to do Jack went over to see if he could help. While Sun was holding out the sling that Charlie had made so that carrying Aaron about the island would be easier, Claire for her part seemed reluctant to release the baby from her arms even for an instant. She held him up to her face and cooed at him as he cooed back and made clumsy grabs for her hair.

"Good morning, Jack," Claire said when she saw him drawing close. She looked happier and more relaxed than Jack had seen her for several days.

"Morning," Jack answered. He helped Sun settle the sling over Claire's shoulder and place Aaron inside. She smiled at him before moving away to pack up her own belongings, but not so quickly that Jack could not see that she did not appear nearly so happy as Claire did. "I didn't hear him crying last night. Don't tell me that he's already sleeping all the way through."

Even after Aaron was settled, Claire continually reached down so that her baby could grab at her fingers. She laughed at Jack's statement. "Oh, no. I look forward to that day for Charlie and me both." Claire gestured over to Charlie, who was folding up the clothes that they had brought with them and placing them into a duffel bag. "Since he's been helping me so much, you know?" Claire waited for Jack to nod before she continued. "Aaron ate normally and slept normally, though."

"Good. That's great to hear." Jack waggled his fingers at Aaron, and Aaron blew a bubble. "And how are you doing, Claire?" She looked up at him. "You've been under a lot of strain, and I know that motherhood is a new experience for you/"

"Oh." Claire's expression was embarrassed as she looked back down. Jack saw a pink flush beginning to crawl up her cheeks and the back of her neck. "Charlie and Sun have been helping me a lot. I think it's going to be better now." Still looking down at Aaron, Claire added softly, "It feels strange to let him out of my sight now."

Jack put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently before letting go. "Don't hesitate to come to me if you have any problems or questions."

"I will." Claire tucked a few strands of hair behind her ears and fidgeted for a moment before she said, "So there's a rumor going around that you want to take the beach camp apart for good."

Jack sighed and tilted his head back so that he could view the cave ceiling. A soft laugh rolled past his lips. "Hurley is not subtle?"

Claire grinned. "Yeah, not so much. But he's still making a good case for you." She paused to make cooing noises at Aaron until he smiled at her. Jack, who knew that Claire was looking for a chance to gather her thoughts for a moment, waited without speaking. "I have to think of Aaron now, don't I? And there are more people living up here than down at the beach these days." Claire looked back up at him finally. "I still have a lot of things down there at the beach that I have to pack up, but I'll probably be back up here in the next few days."

Jack grinned and felt his mood growing better by the second. "That's great." Claire peeled away from him in order to join the crowd of bodies exiting the caves for the hike back to the beach. Jack, falling towards the back of the pack, soon found himself walking side by side with Sun. In the sunlight, the evidence of her insomnia was even more obvious than it had been in the shadows of the caves. Though they did not speak for several minutes, Jack caught her glancing through the trees and in the direction of the shore more than once. "Did you sleep well?"

"No," Sun confessed, shaking her head so that her hair swirled over her shoulders. She was still looking off in the direction of the ocean. Her eyes were clear and solemn when she looked back at him. "Though if you will forgive me for saying, you don't look like you did, either."

Jack snorted, chagrined. "Fine, guilty. Just promise me that you'll take care of yourself."

Sun gave him an arch look that almost made him smile. "I will be fine, Jack. I give you my promise." She hesitated for a moment before she added, "Thank you for asking." Sun returned to staring out at the blue glimpses of ocean that were becoming visible through the trees. "Have you ever been worried about someone before?"

Jack thought of Kate, off in who knew what kind of danger…and he thought of Sawyer. He frowned for a moment, trying to figure out the path that thought must have taken in order to reach the front of his mind, when he heard a series of shouts begin to float up the column as it reached the beach. One of the words that Jack heard being called over and over again was his own name. He glanced towards Sun and saw that all of the blood had already drained from her face. "Come on," Jack snapped, not waiting for a response before he took off down the path. Only the sound of Sun's shoes clattering on the path behind him let him know that she was following.

A crowd was beginning to gather by the time that Jack burst out into the open air of the beach, blocking his view, but he had already heard the murmurs traveling up and down the column as he raced past it. "Jin…Sawyer…Jin…"

Sawyer.

Jack's heart clenched in his chest for a moment, nearly doubling him over. There was a dark part of his brain that was sure he was going to see nothing more than a pair of bodies bobbing against the shoreline.

No, but until Jack saw Sawyer's legs still scissoring weakly through the sand he was sure that he had been half right. Jin trudged over the beach with his head hanging down to a level roughly the same as his shoulder blades and came to a halt several yards off. It did not look as if he laid Sawyer down in the sand nearly so much as his arms just refused to carry him any further. Jin's voice cracked and rasped as he called something to them, and even at a distance Jack could see that he and Sawyer were both wearing dark sunburns.

Sawyer lifted his arm to shield his eyes from the sun. It wasn't until he saw that motion that Jack felt his insides settle back to where each was supposed to be. He raced across the beach and fell into a kneeling position beside Sawyer's body, throwing up a spray of sand. Jack was dimly aware of Sun and Jin standing a few paces off, trying to speak over one another in swift Korean. They were clutching at one another's hands as if they would never let go again.

There were two dark patches on Sawyer's black shirt, one on his shoulder and the other on this side, even though the rest of him was as dry as bone. Jack took a deep breath and felt the cold calm that always occurred when he had a scalpel in his hand settling over him. People were pushing close on the sand behind him, blocking his light, so he called out, "Sayid, I need you to move these people back." Jack began to undo the buttons on Sawyer's shirt.

At the sound of Jack's voice, Sawyer's eyelids first fluttered, then raised up a crack. "Hey, Doc," he muttered.

"Hey, Sawyer," Jack answered. He peeled Sawyer's shirt back and could not stop himself from wincing when he saw how much damage had been done. "Looks like you guys had a hell of a trip." Behind him, Sayid was ordering people to stand back and give him room, while Jin said something to Sun that made her gasp. Tuning them all out again, Jack slid two of his fingers into the crook of Sawyer's neck to take his pulse. He made a shushing sound as Sawyer winced and tried to push Jack's hand away from the sunburn.

"I lost the gun," Sawyer said in a voice so low that Jack had to lean forward and strain in order to hear him. "Lost the letters…the kid…just let it all go to hell and back."

"Don't worry about that right now." The pulse beneath Jack's fingers was steady, but more rapid than he had hoped for. "In fact, just be quiet for a while, all right? Save your energy." Jack tilted Sawyer's body to the side so that he could get a better look at the wound on his ribs, drawing a harsh expletive from Sawyer as his injured shoulder was briefly asked to bear weight. Jack again drew his breath in sharply through his teeth.

"Sun," he called. When there was no answer, Jack looked up to see her engaged in a deep conversation with Jin. She had put one of her hands over her mouth. "Sun!" She flinched before turning towards him, and Jack saw that her face had gone the color of milk. "Whatever it is, it can wait. What I need for you to do right now is run back to the caves and get my medicine bag for me. Make sure that the sewing kit and the pocket knife with the pearl handle are both inside. Then I need you to go through the snack cart and collect all of the alcohol that we didn't use on Boone-it should be in the lowest drawer-and a bottle that says 'Keflex' on the label. It should be in the top. Got all of that?" Jack waited for Sun's nod before he ordered, "Repeat it back to me."

"The sewing kit, the knife with the pearl handle, the alcohol, and the antibiotics," Sun said firmly. Though she glanced towards Jin every few seconds, her face was calm and her eyes were clear.

"Perfect. Go." Jack didn't wait to see Sun take off at a sprint before he turned back to look at Sawyer's injuries. He probed at the obvious wound in Sawyer's shoulder, earning another litany of obscenities and a surprisingly strong hand grabbing for his wrist. "I know, I know," Jack said, pulling Sawyer's hand away and setting it back by his side. "But you have to stay as still as you can."

"That's a hell of a lot easier for you to say than it is for me to do, Jack," Sawyer said through gritted teeth. He sounded more awake now, though he was still deathly pale beneath the sunburn. Jack wondered how much blood he had already lost. He slid his fingers into the crook so that he could feel the pulse there again, steady and sure and not likely to stop soon.

Sayid, satisfied that the crowd was going to hang back without need of him standing guard over them, drifted close enough so that he and Jack could exchange glances. Sayid's face became very still when he caught sight of Sawyer's wounds, obviously the work of gunfire. "It would be very difficult for Sawyer to inflict those wounds upon himself accidentally," Sayid said in a low voice. "I would even say that it is impossible."

"I know," Jack said, watching the trees for Sun's return. Meanwhile, he probed with gentle fingers along Sawyer's side, examining the bullet that by some miracle seemed to have struck his ribs and stayed there rather than piercing any of the organs beyond.

"I can hear both of you, you know, and, no, I did not shoot myself with my own goddamned-fuck!" Sawyer tried to twist away as Jack found the bullet. Sayid put his hand on Sawyer's uninjured shoulder and pushed him back down, ignoring the middle finger that he was shown in response.

"Thanks," Jack said to Sayid. More loudly, to Sawyer, he added, "You got lucky. It's broken two of your ribs, but that's as deep as it went."

"Yeah, I feel real lucky." Beneath the burn, Sawyer's face had gone the color of unbleached linen. His eyes began to roll backwards in his head.

"Sawyer!" Jack called once, and then again, louder, when he got no response. He snapped his fingers in front of Sawyer's eyes until they focused again. "Stay with me a little while longer."

"I didn't hit my head," Sawyer grunted, closing his eyes. He fixed Jack with a bleary glare when Jack began snapping his fingers in front of his face again.

"Then humor me. I still don't want you passing out," Jack said. He examined both of Sawyer's wounds, even lifting Sawyer's shoulder to look at the exit wound on the other side, but saw no sign of infection yet. The salt water was probably to thank for that. A wave of relief rolled from the crown of his head and all the way down to his toes.

"You're the boss." Sawyer sounded more exhausted and beaten down than Jack had ever heard before. He tilted his head back into the sand, closing his eyes. Only the slow curling motions that his fingers were making through the sand let Jack know that he hadn't passed out, anyway.

Jack squeezed at Sawyer's good shoulder and watched as the movements of Sawyer's fingers hitched for a second. "Okay," he said, noticing for the first time that Jin was still standing quietly to one side and waiting to be noticed again. Right, he needed to remember that he had two patients here. Jack looked around. "Shannon!" he called.

She took a step forward, trailing Vincent's leash in her hand. "Yeah?" Shannon asked, staring at Sawyer's bared chest, which Jack realized for the first time was caked with dried blood. Jack had taken one look upon beginning his examination, determined that very little of it was fresh, and had not thought of it again.

"I need you to do a couple of things for me, all right?" Jack waited for Shannon's nod before he continued. "Start a fire and get some water boiling on it. Once you've done that, start Jin alternating between water and some of the fruit juice that Sun has been experimenting with." Shannon nodded, her face pale but calm, and handed Vincent's leash off to the strange young woman who carried the dive bag with her everywhere that she went. The woman looked taken back to be trusted with something that Shannon valued so highly, but she still leaned down and ruffled Vincent's ears. "Small sips, though. Don't let him gulp at it. Got all of that?"

Shannon's lips moved as if she was reciting it to herself in order to commit it to memory. She nodded. "Yeah. I can do that."

"Good girl." Jack turned back to Sayid. "Can you help me get him back to his shelter?"

Sayid nodded and knelt by Sawyer's side, sliding his arm beneath Sawyer's shoulders. Sawyer opened his eyes long enough to mutter something indistinct about not being 'their goddamned rage doll', but he wasn't fighting very hard. Jack and Sayid both ignored him.

"Boiling water?" Sayid asked in a low voice, though surely he already knew the answer.

"Yes." Jack and Sawyer both grunted, one from effort and the other from pain, as Sawyer was levered back to his feet. Sawyer hung his head between his shoulder blades and panted. Though he was still terribly worried for her, Jack was glad that Kate was not there to see them. Guilty memories of the last time that he and Sayid had carried Sawyer suspended between them like this buffeted him with a nearly physical force. "Come on. I don't want to take that bullet out on the beach."

End Part Five


	6. Chapter 6

Part Six

Sun ran at a dead sprint all the way up the path back to the caves, ignoring the burning in her chest and the cramp that was trying to get started in her left calf. The temptation to stray off the path and find a shorter route was strong, becoming stronger the more exhausted that she became. Only the fear of becoming lost and wasting time kept her going in a straight line…and, for a moment, there was a part that was purely fear.

The Others were real. They had taken Michael's child. That meant that no one was safe traveling alone. If everything that Jin told her was true, then no one was safe at all.

'Do not think of this now,' Sun told herself, realizing that she had unconsciously begun to slow down. She forced herself back up to a sprint. 'Do not let it distract you. There will be time for fear later.' She put her hand against her side as a cramp knifed through the flesh. She should have taken the opportunity to visit a gym more often when physical fitness had still been a luxury.

The toe of Sun's sneaker caught at a loose rock just as she came back within sight of the caves, dragging her feet out from under her like a riptide. She would have fallen hard if a pair of hands had not appeared from out of nowhere to catch her. Still thinking about the Others, Sun screamed and slapped the hands away before she could shake the hair out of her eyes to see who her rescuer was. She was released quickly, almost in a panic, as soon as she caught her balance again.

Sun flipped her hair back from her eyes and put her hand against her chest, where she could feel her heart pounding so hard that it felt as if she was going to break her sternum. She looked up and realized that the person who had scared her so badly while trying to rescue her had been none other than Hurley. He was wearing an expression suggesting that Sun had scared him nearly as badly as he had frightened her.

"Bad time?" Hurley asked, holding his hands up in the universal gesture for surrender.

Sun shook her head. "No, I'm sorry. You only frightened me." Realizing that the more time she spent talking to Hurley meant the longer that Jack had to wait before he could begin his job, Sun ignored the aching in her calves and thighs and trotted the final few yards into the caves. Hurley followed closely behind her.

"Is something wrong?" he asked when Sun headed without hesitation to the side cave that Jack had set up as his infirmary. Finding the battered leather pack that Jack had been using as his medical bag since the crash, Sun peeked inside only long enough to make sure that the sewing kit and the knife were inside before she began ransacking the drawers of the snack cart. She felt rather than saw Hurley at her back.

"Dude, something is definitely wrong," he finally answered his own question in a low voice, sounding as if he might be sick.

Sun found the last few bottles of alcohol exactly where Jack had said they would be. It was a pitifully small collection. She wrapped the bottles hurriedly in a spare tee shirt so that they would not break and shoved them deep into the pack before she began looking for the antibiotics.

"There was an accident," Sun called over her shoulder as eh pulled all of the medicine bottles from the top drawer and lined them up in a row along the top of the cart. "Keflex," she breathed when she found it, and threw it into the bag. Pausing to scrutinize the labels, she tossed several more in after it.

"Um, so, when you say accident?" Hurley asked. Sun turned to look at him. He made quotation marks with his fingers. "You say it like…'accident'."

"Jin and Sawyer are back, but Sawyer is hurt. Jack is trying to help him now." Sun hesitated, aware that her actions had begun to draw a crowd and that what she was about to say could very well cause a panicked chain reaction. She leaned forward and lowered her voice. "The Others are the ones who wounded Sawyer."

"God in heaven," Hurley muttered beneath his breath. He went on, in a faux-bright tone that fooled nobody, "Well, that just makes the whole thing better."

Sun settled the pack across her shoulders. "I must go," she said. "Please try to keep everyone near the caves."

"Someone should go with you," Hurley said quickly.

Sun hesitated, thinking of the concrete proof she had been given that the Others existed and how dangerous it was going to be for her to run back down that path alone. She took a deep breath and blew it out before shaking her head. "No. I can travel more quickly if I go alone." She leaned over, massaged her calves for a few seconds, and jogged back out into the sunlight.

Sun could not sprint back to the beach as she had on her way to the caves, but she did her best. She breathed through her nose, pushed all of the fear that she could from her mind, and forced her aching legs to keep her moving. 'It does not matter that you are not an athlete,' Sun told herself, finding that her thoughts had begun to move in rhythm to her pounding feet. 'You have a job that you must do.'

When a second shadowy figure jumped onto the path in front of Sun, she no longer even had the breath to scream. Her mouth fell open, and the faint squeak that she was able to manage was quickly muffled beneath the weight of a warm, callused hand. Sun pushed it aside, her eyes wide as she recognized the owner. "Michael?" she whispered.

His eyes were wide, almost panicky. When several seconds went by without an answer, Sun was no longer certain that Michael was even hearing her. His lips were cracked, and his skin was shining but virtually sweat-free in spite of the fact that the jungle was sweltering. Sun's free hand came up to cover her mouth again.

"They took Walt," Michael said in a low, grim voice. His body vibrated with a contained violence that Sun had never seen more than hints of before. "Those sons of bitches took my boy."

Sun looked him up and down and wondered how he was even managing to stay on his feet. "Jack is this way," she said finally, taking Michael by the hand and pulling him down the path with her.

---

"She should be back by now," Jack muttered, crouching by Sawyer's side on the tarp that had been set up as an impromptu operating table outside of Sawyer's tent. The light inside had been too dim for what Jack needed to do. He looked across the crowd, to where Shannon was keeping Jin seated through an exaggerated series of gestures and was rising to her feet every few seconds to peer anxiously into the pot of water. Apparently no one had every explained the old wives tale to her.

Though the same could probably also be said for watched jungles. Jack sighed, muttered a creative string of oaths beneath his breath, and turned away. He pushed back a few strands of hair sticking to the sweat that glistened on Sawyer's face, causing Sawyer to open his eyes and look at him. Jack had not even realized that Sawyer was still conscious, so unused was he to a Sawyer that didn't take the opportunity to run his mouth.

"You got quite a mouth on you there, Doc," Sawyer said in a low, tired voice. "What would the ladies think if they knew?"

"It seems to work just fine for you," Jack said. That same lock of hair was trying to creep down into Sawyer's eyes again. Jack moved to push it back one more time, unsure of what he was doing even as he was doing it.

Sawyer made an irritated noise and made as if to shove Jack's arm away, used the wrong hand to do so, and had to let it fall back to the tarp with a quickly drawn hiss of pain. Jack put his hand on Sawyer's arm to keep it still. "Hey. I told you to quit moving."

"When we both know that ain't going to happen until the day I die." Sawyer's eyes were open again, fixing him with that criminally blue stare. Jack thought that he even sounded afraid. It was a long way from the man who had tried to goad Jack into letting him bleed out across the jungle floor.

"You're not going to die today," Jack said, speaking to soothe himself as much as Sawyer. "Neither wound looks infected yet. You've lost a lot of blood and you're going to feel like hell until you build up more-"

"No stranger to that," Sawyer muttered. Jack ignored him.

"But you're not going to die," Jack finished. "Once I take that bullet out you'll be just fine. Even have a couple of new scars to impress those ladies."

Sawyer's eyelids had been slipping downwards again while Jack spoke, but as soon as he mentioned taking the bullet out his eyes flew open again. "Goddamnit," he groaned. "Sorry, Jack, but you and me? We don't have such a great history with knives."

Because they were both exhausted and one of them had far less blood in his body than he actually needed, Jack decided that he was going to let that one slide, too. "I'll be as quick and gentle as I can," he promised. "Someone was looking out for you, Sawyer. When the first bullet struck your shoulder, it looks like it probably spun you off to the side. The second bullet broke a few of your ribs, but it didn't go deep enough to pierce any organs."

Sawyer snorted out a laugh and then winced a second later. "Yeah, someone's definitely got their eye on me. You have got to be the most stubborn optimist that I have ever met."

"If that bullet had gone straight into your abdomen, you and I would not be having this conversation right now," Jack said, hearing his voice for a moment growing sharp. Sawyer looked at him. Jack sighed and, picking up the water bottle that had been brought to him on request a few minutes earlier, unscrewed the cap. Sawyer grabbed the bottle away with his good hand before Jack could help him sit up.

"Thanks, but if we get much closer I'm going to expect dinner and a movie."

Jack let the bottle be pulled from his fingers, deciding that he had too much going on at once to ponder Sawyer's eccentricities. "Don't gulp at that," he warned instead. "Just-"

"Sip at it," Sawyer finished for him. He took a drink, clearly having to fight in order to obey his own words. "The last samurai and I already went through that puppet show."

"Convalescence will not affect your charm, I can already tell," Jack muttered. It earned him a soft and quickly aborted laugh as he leaned forward to look at Sawyer's shoulder again.

"That stopped bleeding hours ago," Sawyer muttered. He shifted and winced as he tried to find a more comfortable position. "I wouldn't have any left if the damned thing hadn't."

"Let me do my job, okay?" Sawyer flinched for a moment as Jack's fingers probed around the edges of the wound. Jack tried to be more gentle, until his fingers were moving so lightly that he wasn't sure that Sawyer could feel him at all. "I haven't been going through your tent and trading out suntan lotion for extra mangos, have I?"

Sawyer sketched out a different kind of salute than the one that Jack had frankly been expecting and did not speak again. Jack was wondering whether or not he should apologize, and also just where in the hell _that_ impulse had come from, when he glanced up in time to see a pair of figures come running off the path. A pair, when he was pretty sure that he had only sent the one.

Jack rose to his feet before his brain had a chance to catch up with the rest of him. "Stay here," he said quickly, and "Shut up," when Sawyer snickered. He sprinted towards the pair as they ran towards him, easily outdistancing the crowd.

Sun was clenching Michael's fingers in one hand a cluster of freshly picked plants in the other; she must have paused by her garden along the way. Her knuckles were the color of pearls and green juice was winding down her fingers.

"Jack!" Sun called as soon as she caught sight of him. Her face was the color of bleached linen and there were two points of color high up on her cheeks.

Jack counted all of the symptoms of dehydration on Michael before they came within five yards of each other. "Shannon!" he turned his head to yell over his shoulder. She paused in taking the water from Jin and handing him the juice and looked up. "You have a new patient."

Shannon's eyes widened as she took in Michael's appearance. To her credit, however, she did not so much as turn her head in the direction of the whispers beginning to float through the crowd commenting on Michael's sudden arrival…and on why Walt was not with him. "Come on," Shannon said in a voice that was probably meant to be soothing. To Jack's ears, she mostly sounded scared. "There's juice and other stuff this way."

"I don't want the juice," Michael told Shannon in a voice that was much calmer than his face would have suggested. He put his hand on Shannon's and pulled it away from his arm.

Jack felt a tightening in his chest before Michael spoke again, or even glanced in his direction. It was a movement on the air, a ripple of tension that everyone could feel. "They took Walt," he told Jack. "The Others." Sayid had joined their party by this point, and his expression was one of perfect, sick dismay. "They blew up the raft, and they took him. Sawyer and Jin-"

"Are right here," Jack cut in. He gestured to where Sawyer was lying on the tarp, good arm thrown over his eyes to shield them from the sun, and to where Jin was toying with his juice and watching the conversation with concerned eyes. "Now, you're dehydrated-"

Michael stared at him, not as if Jack had stopped speaking English without warning, but as if Michael wished that he had. "What?" he managed after a long pause. "Man, I do not _care_ if I am dehydrated, all right?" He took a step back, his voice rising. "I don't care if I turned into a damned raisin, those bastards took my boy and I am going to have him back!"

"Lower your voice," Jack said. He could feel Sawyer's eyes burning against the side of his face, but now was not the time to step over for a consult. "Before you terrify everyone." Michael opened his mouth. "You don't care. That's going to be a theme." Jack glanced towards Sawyer again and then stepped closer to Michael, who was on the verge of tears. "We will find him, okay? We will bring him home." Jack paused for only a second before he found himself uttering the words that a doctor was never supposed to say. "I promise. But we have to organize and think this through first so that we don't lose anyone else, and right now? That means taking care of the three of you." Jack waited for Michael to nod, though it came reluctantly and Jack was still half-convinced that Michael was going to bolt off into the jungle as soon as everyone took their eyes off of him. He touched Michael on the shoulder and called it a victory when Michael did not shrug him away. "Shannon will take care of you."

Michael heaved a sigh that sounded as if it hurt him, but nodded and allowed Shannon to lead him away. Jack watched from a distance as Shannon sat him down, handed him a cup of juice, and administered instructions on how to drink it. Jin brought his head close to Michael's in order to speak to him.

"Here," Sun said, pulling the backpack off of her shoulders and handing it to Jack. "I found everything that you asked for."

Jack took the pack and nodded towards the leaves that Sun was holding tightly enough to turn into a pulp in her hands. "And those?"

"Oh." Sun seemed to remember for the first time that she was still carrying them at all. She squared her shoulders and looked back up at Jack. "I am going to make a tea for him," she announced. "For the pain. It will not be strong enough for…for when you have to take it out, but it may help Sawyer sleep afterwards."

"That will be great." Jack opened up the backpack and looked inside. Sun had not only brought him the sewing kit, knife, and antibiotics that he had asked for, but also several other bottles as well. "Someday soon, you an I need to sit down and have a talk about how you know all of this."

Sun's smile was soft and filled with pride, even though it was soon eclipsed by tension and worry again. "A great deal of spare time for hobbies," she said, "and a talent for growing things."

"Good enough." Jack closed the bag and slung it over his shoulder. "Do me a favor, bring the water over?"

Sayid gave him a scrutinizing look as Jack turned back towards Sawyer. "We will have to tell the rest of the camp about the Others eventually."

Jack made note of the 'we', and he was soothed by it. "I know," he said. "But I have to do my job first."

"Jack," Sayid said gently. "Leading _is_ your job."

Jack paused and stared for a moment as Sun hurried over with the pan of water. "I'll need your help with Sawyer," he said.

Sawyer opened his eyes when he felt the tarp shifting around him. "Hell," he said. "I'm just drawing all kinds of crowds today, aren't I?"

"It's your talent," Jack answered in a soothing tone. "You're never going to stop being mouthy, are you?"

"Not until I'm dead," Sawyer answered back. He saw the knife that Jack was pulling out of his bag and took a deep breath, visibly steeling himself. "And on this island, I don't think that even that's a guarantee."

Jack frowned and even opened his mouth to ask what that was all about before he realized that they were wasting time. "Here," he said, taking the Keflex from his bag and shaking two of them out into his palm. "These should look familiar to you."

"Second verse, same as the first," Sawyer said, and swallowed the pills along with a drink of water. Glib tone aside, Jack could still see how tense that he was. It was going to get worse before it got better, unfortunately.

Jack sanitized the knife in the water and then doused both his hands and Sawyer's wound with the remaining alcohol. "Hold on," he told Sawyer. "We're almost done, but this is the bad part." He took a deep breath, sent out a silent prayer to a deity that he had never named to keep his hands steady, and began to cut.

Blood loss or not, when Jack found the bullet at last, it took Sun at Sawyer's shoulders and Sayid at his feet to hold him down.

End Part Six


	7. Chapter 7

Part Seven

Jack dropped the final stitch into Sawyer's shoulder and snapped the thread off with the small set of scissors that had come with the sewing kit. "Done," he said. "I'll wrap your ribs as soon as we get back to the caves. Don't have the supplies here, but I didn't want to let that bullet work any deeper."

Sawyer had been pale and quiet ever since the bullet had been pulled out. Jack could see wrinkles left in the tarp where he had been clenching it in his fists. "Caves?" Sawyer asked, opening his eyes again. They had a moment alone while Sun went to fetch the mystery tea, but Sawyer was keeping his voice pitched low all the same. Jack felt his eyebrows beginning to lift.

"It's not safe here any longer," Jack said.

"Wasn't safe here to begin with," Sawyer groused, but his tone said that he was arguing more out of habit than any real dedication. He poked at the short line of stitches in his shoulder and winced. "I owe you one."

Jack reached out and pulled Sawyer's hand away from the stitches, saying, "You picked at all of your scabs when you were a kid, didn't you?"

Sawyer snorted. Under different circumstances, Jack thought that he might even have smiled. "Yeah."

"Figures." Jack straightened as he saw Sayid approaching from one side and Sun from the other. "I'll add the surgery to your tab."

The corner of Sawyer's mouth twitched up for a moment before he grew somber again. "Jack?" he asked in a voice that Jack swore sounded hesitant.

"Yeah?"

Sawyer noticed Sayid and Sun for the first time, and his expression turned hooded. "Tell you later." When a frown line appeared between Jack's eyes, Sawyer added, "If you're going to wind up thinking that I'm crazy, then I'd rather we do it without an audience."

"All right," Jack said slowly, making a note to watch Sawyer extra closely. Even with the blood loss taken into account, this didn't sound like him.

"Here," Sun said, kneeling by Sawyer's side. She handed Sawyer an airline cup filled with a brown-green liquid. "This will help you with the pain."

Sawyer grabbed the cup from Sun's hands before she even finished speaking. "Darlin', you're beautiful." He took a long drink, grimaced, and went back for another.

"It will make you sleep," Sun cautioned.

Sawyer's smile was tired but, so far as Jack could see, genuine. "That's not going to be a problem. Right now I don't feel good for much else but sleeping." He lifted his eyebrows at Jack, who wondered what the hell had happened out there on that ocean to make Sawyer so subdued now.

"Later," Jack promised. He turned back to Sayid. "Has Michael said anything?"

Sayid made a seesawing gesture with his hand. "A little. He wants to speak with you."

Jack nodded, though he made a mental note to hold that group meeting as soon as possible. "Okay." He let Sayid lead him over to where Jin and Michael still sat. They both looked better for having had the chance to sit in the shade and rehydrate, though in Michael's case that was still a relative term. He rose to his feet as soon as he saw Jack approaching. Jin rose along with him, wearing a concerned expression.

"Well?" Michael asked as soon as Jack came close. He wasn't in danger of yelling anymore, but there was a flat, grim look to his eyes that reminded Jack of his own in the mirror in the first days after losing Sarah. "We going to go find my boy, or what?"

Jack sat down on a log near the fire, hoping that by taking a seat himself he would be able to encourage Michael to do the same. Michael threw him an impatient look as he paced back and forth. "All right, Michael," Jack said. "Tell me everything that happened."

Michael did not stop packing, and his hands had begun to clench and unclench themselves into fists spasmodically. He seemed calmer, though, now that he had something to do. "Two nights ago," he said. "The same day that we launched. Sawyer caught something on the radar, so I sent off the flare. We…" Michael trailed off and sighed. "Man, we drew them right to us."

"There was no way that you could have known this would happen," Jack said gently. He waited for several moments for Michael to continue on his own before he prodded in a soft voice, "And?"

"They came on a boat," Michael said. His voice grew louder as he was distracted from his own sense of guilt by placing it back onto the deserving party. Jack heard whispers beginning to travel through the crowd behind him and ignored them all. In a few minutes it wasn't going to matter, anyway.

Michael shook his head. "We thought that we were going to be rescued. We never stood a chance."

"You thought that it was a rescue craft?" Sayid asked, stepping forward. "It was not a sailboat like your own?"

Michael shook his head. A humorless smile took his face and transformed it. Jack didn't think that it was a favorable change. "No, man. Near as I could tell, it was a fishing boat. Spotlight, gasoline powered engine, the whole works." Michael paused long enough to turn the smile into an unhealthy laugh. "I even heard a damned radio crackling in there."

A sense of cold ran down from Jack's head and all of the way into his toes. Looking at the faces of everyone close enough to hear, he see expressions there identical to the one that he was sure must be mirrored on his own face.

Michael snorted and kicked dirt into the fire. "Yeah, those Others, seems like they have all kinds of hidden talents that we didn't know about." His scuffing grew harder as Michael's voice rose towards a yell, until he was in danger of putting the fire out altogether. No one moved to stop him. "Gotta wonder, just how long have they been playing us? Since Claire was kidnapped? Since the crash?" Michael paused and snorted. "Hell, for all we know, it may even have been since before that."

"Michael, calm down," Jack said, but his voice was so overwhelmed by the rising whispers that he had to trouble even making himself heard or following the order himself, let alone issuing it to anyone else. How long?

"I'm going to get my son back," Michael told Jack, as if he had not heard him speak at all. "That is one promise that I _am_ going to keep."

"We are all going to get him back," Jack said, and realized that he was also making a promise. "But if the Others are this sophisticated, then we're going to have to make plans in order to pull it off. The first thing that we need to do is get everyone off of this beach." Jack stood and felt Sayid's eyes following him closely. He turned back to face the waiting crowd.

"This throws the hatch into a whole new light, doesn't it?" Sayid murmured.

"Yes." Jack heard a note of resolution in his voice that had not been there a moment before. He raised it loudly enough to be heard by all. "Everyone, listen carefully. I want you to grab all of your things and head back up to the caves." A ripple ran through the crowd as if it was a living thing, unease so strong that it was nearly tangible and needed only one good spark to turn it into an outright panic. "The beach is not safe for any of us right now. I don't know when it will safe again. Grab everything that you didn't take with you the last time we went up, especially materials that can be used to make shelters outside of the main caves and alleviate crowding."

"Why?" The young woman who wore the midriff-baring top so often asked. She looked scared. She also looked, Jack noticed, just a little defiant. "I thought the only threat was the crazy French lady."

Jack caught himself glancing at the sun, the only reliable indicator of time that they had left. "I'll explain as soon as I know that everyone is safe," he said. "Right now, I just need all of you to trust me when I say that we need to get off of the beach as soon as we can."

"It's not that we don't trust you, Jack," Charlie said. He was standing at the front of the crowd, where he had thrown his arm around Claire's shoulders at the first hint of danger. Claire, for her part, had her eyes widened about as far as they could go and was clutching Aaron so tightly to her chest that he was beginning to make soft whimpering noises of protest, gearing up for a full-blown wail. "It's just that there are a lot of secrets being kept on this island, yeah? And I've yet to see any good coming out of any of them." A few cries of approval rose from the people clustered behind Charlie. "So if you want us to move again, then at the very least think that we deserve to know why before we make up our own minds."

Jack liked Charlie and on a good day could even find himself thinking of Charlie as a little brother that he never got to have, but when the enthusiastic noises of agreement behind Charlie grew even louder, there were a few seconds when Jack was very tempted to hit Charlie across the mouth. Bright sunshine or not, the beach seemed made for panic on some fundamental level that was sealed into the sand, while the caves were not. Jack had been hoping to wait until they were back in the relative cool and rationality before he was forced to scare everyone right out of their minds. Jack stopped himself from glaring in Charlie's direction only by an extreme act of will as he said, "The Others. They're real."

As Jack had expected, the blood immediately drained from the faces of everyone present, and frightened voices rose until they sounded like the rustling of leaves. For one second, Charlie looked as if Jack had struck him before his expression grew shuttered and stubborn once more. "That's impossible," he said. "Rousseau invented the Others. She took Claire's baby. She probably helped Ethan take Claire when she was still pregnant." With his expression dark and angry, the burn on his head looked more unsettling than ever. "An adventure, if you haven't forgotten, that ended with me _dying_."

"You were blindfolded when Claire was taken, Charlie, you don't know what happened." Jack spoke in a gentle, appeasing tone, but Charlie still back up as if Jack had spat on him.

There would be time for patching up egos later. Jack raised his voice to speak to the rest of the crowd, though he could not stop his eyes from being drawn back to Charlie's forehead again and again and again. "Jin, Michael, and Sawyer were attacked while they were out on the raft by a group of people with guns and a gasoline-powered boat." A string of gasps and frightened cries began to ring out, so Jack hurried on while he still had control. "They hurt Sawyer, they destroyed the raft, and they took Walt. I don't see how any of that could have been caused by Danielle Rousseau."

Charlie's face went dark in a way that Jack had never seen before, but the other castaways were listening to him. One of them, Jack noticed, was Claire. "We're not going to let them take Walt without a fight." Jack found that he warmed to the speech as he gave it and wondered if this was what leadership was finally meant to feel like. "But we need a safe place to plan if we're going to get him back. The caves are the closest thing that we have to that. I can't force any of you to go if you're dead-set against it. I can only remind you that we've stuck together this long because we're safer as a group than we are alone."

A man that Jack dimly remembered as being named Larry nudged his way to the front of the group. "You said that these 'Others'-" He made a face as he spoke, the way that he would while saying 'vampire' or 'bogey man'. "You said that they attacked from a ship with a gasoline engine?"

"Yeah, I did," Jack said, not entirely certain where Larry was going with this.

"Don't boats like that usually have radios?" Larry's eyes began to gleam with hope that he was hardly managing to keep contained. The heads of everyone around him began to swivel, many of them wearing the exact same expression. "So, if we do fight the Others, and we manage to beat them or at last steal one of their boats, then we might be able to go home."

"Yes." Jack had not even thought of it until that point. The word tasted sweet on his tongue, and he wanted to say it again. "Michael heard something that crackled like a radio from inside the Others' ship. Yeah, I think it's definitely possible."

The glowing look was traveling from person to person like contagion, and Jack was sure that it was also reflected on his own. Only Sayid, he noticed, was not sharing the expression, maintaining instead hooded eyes and a carefully blank face. Within seconds, the energy of the mob had transformed from a state tiptoeing towards panic and into a pure and brilliant joy. Jack thought that the villagers who chased after Frankenstein with their pitchforks and their torches had felt something like this, and if they did?

'Let them come,' Jack caught himself thinking. 'If the monster in this movie is the kind that looks normal but steals away little kids, then plans be damned and let them come.' He realized that he was close to grinning on the giddy high of revelation. Jack did his best to ignore the solemn way that Sayid was regarding them all.

"Fuck," Larry said in an awed tone, managing to turn the obscenity into something nearly spiritual. "We could go _home_." He shook his head quickly, as if he needed to remind himself to come back to reality again before he could make the story come true. "If we can fight better from the caves, then let's go to the caves. I don't know who these people are, but I'm sick of letting them our next moves for us."

Larry and several of the other castaways glanced towards Claire then, their most visible symbol of what had happened the last time that they had allowed themselves to be fearful and passive. For her part, Charlie had her hand pressed to her temple and her eyes pressed shut against the light, as if it was hurting her. Aaron began to make the soft whimpering noises of a baby working his way up to a full-blown wail, but his mother's hand did not find its way down into the sling to soothe him.

Jack had just started towards her, concerned, when Claire opened her eyes again. Little by little, the lines of pain began to smooth themselves out. "I agree," she said, looking towards Larry. "I want to go up to the caves, too."

Charlie stared at her as if she had slapped him. "You're believing this?"

"You've wanted me to move back up the caves for ages, Charlie," Claire said in a conciliatory tone that Jack could see beginning to work on Charlie within seconds in spite of his best efforts to resist it. She noticed that Aaron was beginning to fuss and lifted him up into her arms. He quieted immediately, stuffed his fist into his mouth, and goggled at them all. "I don't want him to grow up here. I don't want him to grow up somewhere where he could be hunted for his whole life."

Charlie took a deep breath, huffed it out, and nodded. "All right," he acquiesced, but still did not look pleased.

Jack clapped his hands together to draw everyone's attention back onto him. If they could find a way to preserve the glow that he saw on all of their faces, he thought, then they would never need their homemade torches again.

If this went well, if they managed what the thing that Jack was not allowing himself to think about directly from a primitive fear of jinxing it, then they would not need their homemade torches for much longer, anyway.

"Take everything that you can carry," Jack said. "Not just the things that you'll need immediately. We could be staying up there for a while." He waited until everyone had scattered back to their shelters to begin packing before he walked back over to Sawyer. Sayid's eyes were heavy and intent upon the side of his face. "Will you help me get Sawyer back to the caves?" he asked. "We can come back for his things later."

Sayid nodded and bent with Jack to slide his arms beneath Sawyer's back. Sawyer hardly stirred as he was lifted to his feet, his own exhaustion and Sun's concoction doing their work well. Jack made a mental note to ask her what she had put into it, so that he could preserve the heavy sedatives for as long as possible. Emergencies were certain to arise, now that they had committed themselves to staying on the wide-eyed no longer.

Sayid waited for the silence between them to become heavy and pregnant enough to almost be a physical thing before he said, "What you are urging them towards is open warfare."

Jack looked over Sawyer's lowered head so that he could meet Sayid's gaze. Sayid's face was smooth, his eyes as dark and unreadable as they had been moments before, but Jack still thought that his next words would be the ones that sealed or shattered loyalty between them.

'I didn't ask for this,' he wanted to say, even though he knew that it was only an excuse. Asked for or not, this was his situation. It was long past the time that he began to explore these new boundaries and find out if he was really worthy of them.

"We didn't ask for this," Jack said finally, which was at least marginally better. Sawyer made a soft, pained sound without actually waking up, and Jack shifted him into a more comfortable position without fully registering what he was doing. "Do you think that we're doing the wrong thing?"

Sayid paused and looked pained. "We have come to a place where all of our other choices are worse," he said. "But listen to me on this, Jack: do not relish it, and do everything that you can to stop them from enjoying it, also."

'I will,' Jack thought, surprised to hear himself saying instead, "I'll need your help."

Even though the pained look deepened, Sayid nodded. "Then you have it."

"Thank you." As they carried Sawyer up the path to the caves, Jack thought that, no, there was no part of him that would enjoy it. If it returned a child to his father, though, and gave them another chance-their best and possibly their final chance-to see civilization again? Then there was definitely a part of Jack, frustrated and tired and strung out to his limit by the need to be watchful, that would not mind.

End Part Seven


	8. Chapter 8

Part Eight

If the beach dwellers had been able to troop back to their own shelters with a relative lack of fanfare that morning, then their return was met the exact opposite reaction. Jack, moving slowly at the back of the pack with Sawyer and Sayid, heard the shouts and questions beginning long before anyone had the chance to prevent pandemonium. He grit his teeth and said in a quiet tone to Sayid, "The cave that I've been using as an infirmary has a side entrance. Let's use that."

They carried Sawyer around and into the deserted cave where Jack had treated Sayid's leg wound weeks before. Jack settled Sawyer down on the bedding that he had moved in there since, quickly washed the blood from Sawyer's torso and wrapped his ribs, and then checked his pulse again. It was still steady and strong.

Sawyer muttered something liquid when Jack's fingers slid into the crook of his neck and tried to twist away yet again, but did not wake. Jack waited patiently for him to settle down. For being the first gunshot victim that Jack had performed surgery on while crouched on an open beach with only the most rudimentary of tools available, none of Sawyer's wounds had begun to bleed again and his vital signs were good. Jack straightened, not liking the idea of leaving a patient unsupervised so soon and liking even less the idea of doing so in favor of having to mediate the chaos that he could already hear echoing through the stone. He thought of the words that Sayid had spoken to him earlier that day, to the effect that he had two jobs now. On the day that he was able to decide which one was more important and how he was supposed to balance them both in the meantime, Jack decided, he would cut Sawyer out as the middleman and build that still himself.

Sayid had left him and returned to the main cave as soon as he had seen that Jack did not require his help, so when Jack slid out of the infirmary's alternate entrance he did it alone. A few frightened looks and questions came his way immediately, but for the most part the cave's occupants were saving them for Michael and Jin. Sun and-well. Sun and, to Jack's surprise, Shannon were doing everything that they could to keep the crowd at a distance, but increasingly they were being mobbed.

"Hey!" Jack yelled, jumping forward. "Easy, easy! Give them a break!" He put his body between the crowd and the quartet. Sun said something in Korean that Jack was willing to bet was not a glowing recommendation of their manners. She pushed her hair back from her forehead with one hand and grabbed for Jin with the other. He pulled her close to his side. "I know that you're all scared and confused, so this is everything that we know. The Others are real. The Others took Walt, and they destroyed the raft. We can and we are going to fight them-" Jack raised his voice towards a yell in order to be heard over the rising tide of noise. "But unless we want to lose more people we have to plan like rational adults first."

A thumping sound came from the back of the cave. Jack jerked around and peered over the top of the crowd. Locke and Kate stood just inside one of the far entrances, presumably having come in right in time to hear Jack's impromptu speech. They had been carrying a gutted and already skinned boar between them; Jack could see the skin spread out on the ground just beyond the entrance. The boar itself now lay on the cave floor with its opened belly smiling at them all like a great, grotesque mouth. The thumping had been Kate dropping her end of it in shock.

Jack looked her over automatically, searching for wounds. When she seemed to have incurred nothing more serious than a bruise high up on her cheek and a scrape on one of her shoulders, his relief was so great that it came close to buckling his knees.

"Looks like you've had an interesting day," Locke said mildly. He tapped at Kate's arm. She twitched and bent to pick up her end of the boar again. Together, they began to pull their prize over to the largest fire.

"Looks like you've had the same," Jack answered.

"So, what can we do to help?" Locke asked, setting the boar down and straightening. He had to have heard the wary tone in Jack's voice, but was for the moment choosing not to respond to it.

Jack noted the 'we' and felt himself bristling inwardly before he could quite halt the action, but he forced it down to a place where it would not show on his face. The time for petty squabbling, if there had ever been one, was surely far in the past now. "Got any ideas?" Locke stared at Jack, looking genuinely surprised to hear Jack asking. Jack shrugged and spread his hands, noticing that Kate had begun to glance swiftly between the two of them as if she was at a tennis match and had not quite decided which team she wanted to root for. Jack was not exactly comforted, not when he saw how white her face had gone. "Time to start focusing on ideas here, not personalities. We need to get Walt back, and we need to go home."

Something in Locke's face tightened at the mention of going home, but he nodded. "We need to bring Walt home," he agreed. Jack made note of the ambiguous wording before he placed it away in the rapidly expanding file that he was keeping on the subject of John Locke. "And we need to stop playing around and acting as if we're in a movie and a ship is going to come sailing over the horizon in the nick of time to stop anything terrible from happening." Locke paused and exhaled heavily, nudging at the boar's body with his toe. There was a dime-sized patch of blood on his neck, Jack noticed, and another slightly larger one splashed across the knuckles of his left hand. Beyond that, he and Kate seemed to have killed the boar with as little fuss or mess as picking up a package of steaks at the supermarket.

Locke looked back up, and Jack got the eerie feeling that he knew everything that Jack had been preparing to say. He blinked and saw the fire crackling in anticipation of the meat, saw the people looking back and forth with concerned expressions as they felt the tension that Locke and Jack seemed able to conjure up with nothing more than a glance now, and felt the sensation dissipate. "We need to organize," Locke said in a calm tone, leaning back over so that he could hoist the boar. Kate rose back to her feet to help, but Locke waved her off, saying, "You've already paid your pound of flesh."

Steve and a man named Bill, a quieter friend of Arzt's, came to help in her place. Jack felt suddenly, curiously, cold, in spite of the fact that he was standing close to one of the fires. A second later, and he was already dismissing the sensation as nothing more than sleep deprivation and too much strain presenting bills that he couldn't put off paying any longer. There was a feeling of fingertips being walked down his spine for another moment before they suddenly flitted away.

"Sentries," Jack heard himself say, his own voice sounding to him as if it were coming from down a long well. "Permanent shelters."

Locke nodded and did not speak for several more moments. With hardly a word being spoken between the three of them, he and the other two men soon had the boar spitted upon the pole that had been lying unused during all those weeks when the boar had been mysteriously missing. Though he had not yet been given a reason to be defensive, Jack took note of the familiarity between them and wondered how many other signs he had missed by limiting his counsel to such a small group.

"That, too," Locke said finally, wiping a few final traces of blood from his hands. He missed some, Jack noticed, beneath his nails. "But in order to get Michael's boy back, what you people are talking about it open warfare against an enemy that you know almost nothing about. That's going to take something a little stronger than informal leadership that can be second-guessed every time one of us gets frustrated." Jack felt cold again, and this time the feeling did not go away. "We need to hold some kind of group election, decide in a civilized way once and for all who will lead and far we're going to let them go. Even if most of you decide that Jack is the one to do so-" Jack heard rumblings both in his favor and against him rising from the people behind him. He did not turn his head to make note of who was saying what. "Then it's long past time that everyone gets the chance to say it, rather than just floating along because we don't want to disagree with anyone else."

Hurley startled, his mouth opening and his face reddening with a depth of emotion that Jack had never seen there before. "He's right," Jack said before Hurley could act. Hurley stared at him, confused. The mutterings that had been rising behind Jack cut off as suddenly as if they had been playing from a tape and the cord leading to the stereo had just been pulled from the wall.

Jack spread his hand again, aware that every eye in the cave was on him and wondering if he could ever get used to that kind of scrutiny. Patients tended to be fixated more on their own problems than they were on the people making those problems better, leaving the doctor in the rare position of standing both in front of the camera and behind it. "I was going to suggest the same thing once we had gotten everything settled down again, but that day doesn't look like it's going to be coming any time soon." The rumblings picked up again behind him even though they were more muted now, making Jack acutely aware of the upper hand that Locke had managed to gain by being the first to make the suggestion. 'Not meant to be a politician,' Jack thought again, in the same mental tones with which he had once thought, 'Not meant to be a leader.' Compared to this, though, his first attempts at taking charge had been successes comparable to the final penning of the Constitution.

Locke nodded in a manner than seemed friendly enough. He went on again, "Even if it is Jack when it is all said and done-"

"Or you," Tracy interrupted, coming forward to inspect the meat and squeeze at Steve's shoulder. Jack realized that his jaw had dropped open and that, interestingly, a similar look of surprise had also moved across Locke's face. Tracy looked up, realized that every pair of eyes in the caves was now fixed on her, and flushed a deep scarlet. "Well, he's the one bringing in the food, right? If we made Jack the leader at first because he's the doctor, then it only makes sense that Locke should have a fair shot for the same reason."

Sayid, standing a few yards off, made an abrupt movement. When Jack looked towards him again his face was a blank and careful mask, and he would not catch Jack's eye.

"I'm flattered, Tracy," Locke said slowly. 'He wasn't expecting this,' Jack thought. 'And he's not sure that he wants it…but I'm not sure that he'll turn it down, either.' It was similar enough to Jack's own thoughts in the first few days after the crash to make all of the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. "But I'm not certain that that is a good idea."

"Neither am I," Jack said. The whisperings started up again behind him, reminding him of how petty and threatened those words could appear to people already in a certain mindset. Too bad. Jack wasn't so sure that he still wanted the leadership job, either, and he knew damned well that he had not signed up for spy-novel intrigue. He set his jaw. "Accident or not, Boone did die as a result of your actions."

"Or as a result of yours." Locke was staring straight at him as he said it, face bland and kind, and Jack felt as if a fist had just been driven straight into his gut. Locke shook his head, saying, "We can't blame each other every time that we're beset by misfortune. Not unless you want to blame Michael, Jin, and Sawyer for Walt's abduction, or the island itself every time that it rains. We'll only shatter if we go down that road."

Jack had the feeling that he was a hatchet trying to go up against the finesse of a scalpel, a feeling that he had not experienced in any kind of professional capacity for years. "All right, John," he said. "So what do you suggest?"

Locke blinked before he answered. Jack knew in that half-second lull that he had caught Locke off balance, that Locke had been expecting more bluster, and that was one of the sweetest victories that Jack had had all day. Locke turned to Tracy first rather than addressing Jack immediately. This, too, Jack took as a sign that in some small way he might not be hopelessly out of his depth yet. "We should wait a few days before we vote for anything," Locke said. "Let everyone rest and get their emotions back under control." Locke nodded towards both Jin and Michael, and by implication the absent Sawyer. "Then we the camp can decide whatever it will decide."

"In the meantime, we post sentries," Jack said. He decided that this was not the time to point out that, while Locke did not seem wildly enthusiastic about the idea of leadership, neither was he turning it down. "Everyone here knows everyone else by sight, at least. No one comes near these caves unless they can pass that test. Any volunteers for the first shift?" Steve and Charlie immediately stepped forward, as did Arzt's friend and a woman whose name Jack could not remember, except that she had always been very kind to Walt and had once said that she was a social worker back in the real world. "Good. Meanwhile, we'll need another group to start searching the jungle. A group large enough and sophisticated enough to have a gasoline-powered boat is also going to have to leave some signs of their existence. We've been hugging close to our own territory since we crashed here, and maybe it's our own fault that we haven't noticed other people on the island before now."

"I'll lead that group," Sayid said in a quiet voice. His face was calm, but there was a wary tension strung through his shoulders. He looked around the camp. "Four volunteers should be sufficient. More and we'll be in danger of attracting attention."

"I want to go," Shannon said quickly. Of all the people in the camp, Sayid was the only one who did not appear surprised to hear it. Shannon peered around at the assortment of astonished faces. "What?" She folded her arms over her chest. "He gave me his dog, okay? And none of us are exactly on home turf in that jungle."

"You will be very helpful," Sayid said, stunning everyone perhaps even more than Shannon had with her initial offer. He raised his eyebrows at the rest of the camp. "Anyone else? If you have a military history or any experience with firearms, then your aid will be greatly appreciated."

A young man whom Jack would buy his first drink if he was even of age with floppy dark hair and eyes that would be devastating when he learned how to use them stepped forward. "I used to hunt deer in Wyoming," he said in a soft voice that didn't sound as if he was used to being the center of attention, flushing and speaking a little louder when he realized that everyone was straining in order to hear him. "I'm more used to a rifle than I am a handgun, but I've fired one before."

"That is fine," Sayid told him. The kid nodded and fidgeted for a moment before going to stand beside Shannon. Jack was not certain whether his nervousness was arising from Sayid's easy acceptance, from being in such close proximity to Shannon, or the situation at large. His previous impressions of the youth had all been of a particularly unruffled young man.

Two other men, each appearing to be in the middle of their forties, stepped forward. "I was in the Army," one of them said.

"Ah." Sayid looked him over. Jack could all but see Sayid's mind working as he did the math and realized which war this man had very likely fought in. "And you?" he asked the other.

The second man shrugged and shook his head. "I just want to help."

"That's good enough. We'll leave in ten minutes." Sayid exhaled a long stream of air as the four scattered to gather up what they would need.

"Try to be back before dark," Jack told Sayid as he walked over. He was aware that he had lowered his voice to a level scarcely crawling over a whisper, and it felt unnatural. "There are worse things than the monster out there now."

"I doubt that any of us will be allowed to forget that soon," Sayid said, "but I will take care." He stared in the direction of Steve and Charlie, who were exiting the caves to begin their duties as sentries. "I will leave two of the guns here, should you have need of them." He made a face and began pulling his hair back into the knot he kept it in when he wanted it out of his way. "Though I worry that it may not make it to a vote."

Jack shook his head. "It's not that bad," he said, and wondered if he should take it as a good sign or a bad one that he whole-heartedly believed it. "This is only tension. Believe it or not, I think it's been inevitable since the beginning. It's just obvious now because we're stopping and facing it. Wish I could say that I've seen anything like it before, though."

Sayid's face was dark. "I have. People are willing to trade much for a leader who can alleviate their material troubles, and then only later realize how much they have paid. Be careful." He turned to go over to where his chosen group was waiting.

"You do the same." Jack paused for a moment to watch Locke as he began preparing the boar over the fire, feeling that sensation of fingers tracing patterns over his spine one more time. Paranoia, almost certainly. He wondered how far away either of them were from turning into a bad _Apocalypse Now_ cliché.

Sun took over the hydration duties with Shannon gone, alternating juice and water between the two men in her care. Both Jin and Michael had sunburns fit to make Jack wince just by looking at them, but Sun was already at work crushing several fistfuls of aloe into the makeshift bowls that they had begun to fashion out of gourds. Seeing that there was nothing that he could do except counsel Sun towards more of the same, Jack turned away. Denied his original job and with his adopted one in jeopardy, he found that he was edgy and off-center, unsure of where he should be or what he should be doing with his time. There were two people on the island that he knew of who could shake him out of such a mood, whether by cajoling or by pure, loud-mouthed force. While they warred equally in his mind, at the moment only one of them was conscious.

"Hey." Kate looked up at Jack as he took a seat next to her. Even at a glance Jack could see that she was exhausted. "I'm surprised that I didn't see you volunteering for anything."

Kate gave a faltering smile and rubbed at her shoulder. As she moved the fabric aside, Jack saw that there was another bruise there, bigger than the one on her cheek. "I'm, uh, working on that need I have to be a part of everything. Call it character improvement." She groaned and flinched as her fingers found a tender spot. "And I don't think I'd be good to anyone right now. I'll take a later shift."

This was not the Kate that he knew, not by a long shot. Jack was once again treated to the sensation of all of the hair on the back standing up at once. "Anything serious?" he asked.

Kate shook her head, her curls momentarily bouncing forward to hide her face before she swatted them back. "Just tired." She stared at the main fire as the first scent of cooking boar began to fill out the caves.

"You and Locke talk about anything interesting while you were out?"

The glance that Kate flicked over him became sharp. "Are you kidding me?" She sighed and rubbed at her eyes. "Jack. I'm exhausted, and this is ridiculous."

"You were gone for longer than a day. I was worried. Then you show up covered in bruises and not acting like yourself at all and, yes, I am concerned for you." Jack realized that he wasn't whispering any longer and that they were on the verge of an outright argument. He snapped his mouth shut with an abrupt clicking sound. Jack and Kate had been dancing from the moment that they had met, but, casting his mind back, Jack could still not remember the exact place where they had begun dancing around each other rather than together.

Kate lowered her hands from her eyes long enough to peek at him. "Jack," she said. She made a visible effort to turn her tone into something sweeter, possibly in response to the genuine worry that had been in Jack's own. "It poured all day yesterday. Locke and I got stranded in a valley. I slipped and banged myself up on some loose rocks. We made small talk until it stopped raining and I felt well enough to move on and, oh, by the way, he bashed my head in with a rock when I wasn't looking. You're talking to a clever zombie right now. Don't I preserve well?"

"Ha," Jack said, glaring at her. "That's not as funny as you think."

Kate reached out and squeezed at his arm. "Get some sleep, Jack. You look like the real zombie here." An uncomfortable moment went by in which Jack did not answer and Kate cast her eyes down towards the ground, her lips moving as if she were admonishing herself for words that she could not bring herself to say. After heaving the sigh of a knight readying herself for battle, she looked in the direction of Jin and Michael and said in a small voice, "You said that Sawyer was hurt."

"He was shot," Jack said, reaching out to grab Kate quickly as she lunged to her feet. "He'll heal. He's sleeping right now."

"But you left him alone?" Kate stared at him, her mouth slightly open. Though her words could have been taken as accusatory, the tone behind them was naked human fear. Jack surprised himself by feeling a quick flash of jealousy, not of Sawyer for being able to incite such a visceral reaction, but of… 'Oh, my God.' Jack realized that his mouth had fallen open.

"I'm going to check on him in a few minutes," Jack said finally. His voice sounded as if it were coming from another person, someone calm and collected and not at all in the middle of having a few previously unquestionable truths flipped upside down on him. He licked and his lips. "You can come with me, but then you should try to get some rest yourself."

Though she was clearly still shaken, Kate tried to smile. "Only if you sleep, too." She extended her littlest finger towards him. "Promise me."

Jack stared at the hand that she was offering him. "You're going to make me pinky swear?"

"Can't drug you again." Kate nudged insistently at his arm with her pinky until he gave in and took it.

"I promise that, barring emergency, I will try to get some sleep."

"All that I ask," Kate said. She pushed herself to her feet, heading for the infirmary cave, and left Jack alone for a few seconds to stare into the flames and wonder about this epiphany that had just run into the side of his head.

End Part Eight


	9. Chapter 9

Part Nine

Sawyer knew, in a part of his brain that was at present only capable of sending out the weakest and most static-filled of signals, that he was back at the caves, that he had been carried there by Jack and Sayid, and that it was long past time that he woke up so that he could tell Jack about what he had seen. He knew that horror movies and ghost stories didn't come true, that it was time to go back to the real world. He knew this.

But that part of Sawyer's mind was far away and still in shock over all the reality-bending and physics-defying things that it had already been forced to deal with over the past few days. In the meantime, he was facing wonders.

Sawyer and that Metro kid had never really stopped to chat, outside of that one time that Sawyer had berated him for being a damned stinking thief as he was kicking his ass for him, so he didn't really see why he and the puppy should be having a tete a tete now. It was that more than any other, that made the bits of himself struggling so hard to hang onto rationality want to dismiss the whole mess as a hallucination. There were many fine things that Sawyer would have liked to see acting as a salve for his battered subconscious right about then, ranging from a bottle of really good bottle of Jack Daniels to Kate with enough of the Jack already in her to ease away those lines of anxiety that seemed to radiate from her at every moment of every day, but the Martha Stewart castoff was not one of them.

And yet, there he was, just as big as a Dallas Saturday night and almost as bloody. Sawyer's eyes were drawn inexorably towards the bloody wound on Boone's chest, where shards of his own ribcage gleamed like maggots. This was only in the seconds that he couldn't spare for Boone's leg, where the angle was one never meant to be visited upon a human bone. Sawyer didn't see how the kid was managing to stay so placid and still when such a fundamental _wrongness_ had been visited onto a major limb, and he damned sure didn't want to stick around long enough to see what would happen when Boone tried to get up and walk away.

"So you've gotten your eyeful," Boone said, a disgruntled expression moving across his face. One side of it was entirely caked over with blood. 'I shouldn't know these things,' Sawyer thought, 'because I never saw the body.' 'That don't mean a thing. The whole camp was gossiping about it. You've been reading too much, got your imagination all revved up in the meanwhile, and off we go.' 'But I didn't _see_ it.' Sawyer really hoped that both of those voices were originating from inside his head. "Now, you want to sit down so that we can get on with this?"

Boone gestured to an unoccupied log on the other side of a fire so large and golden that it resembled something from a child's storybook more than anything that they had managed to build on the island. Boone himself was sprawled out on the ground, his good leg tucked beneath him while the bad one was extended straight ahead. The expression on his face was that of an increasingly annoyed boy king. All of that blood enhanced the impression, somehow, rather than detracting from it.

"I think I'll stand," Sawyer said in a hoarse voice, looking around. They were deep in a patch of jungle that he had couldn't remember ever seeing before, though when the size of the island was really taken into account he supposed that didn't mean much. When he sniffed at the air, he thought that he detected a very faint trace of motor oil. Chalk that up as one more wrong thing on a very long list of them, a list that began and ended with the fact that he was standing in the middle of nowhere and holding a civil conversation with a zombie, or a ghost, or…

'A hallucination,' Sawyer told himself firmly, 'and not a damned thing more than that. You're about two steps away from slipping around that bend for good, old hoss, so might ought to think about digging in those heels now.' He started to surreptitiously scan the trees for the break in the painting, the outline of the door that would take him back to the real world. For all of the problems that they were having there, at least the dead did not sit up and start talking. At the very least, give him the zipper down the monster's back that would let him know that none of this was real.

Boone shrugged and began fiddling with a patch of moss growing by his side. "Your manners are your business, man. I just thought that you might not want to be standing when you heard this news."

Forgetting for the moment the insanity which had to be close if he was actually going to talk to a figment of his imagination, Sawyer took a step forward. Anger and fear pricked parallel lines down his spine, and he imagined that if he were a cat his tail would be fluffed out larger than a bottlebrush while he hissed for everything that he was worth. "What news? What the hell are you talking about?" Sawyer realized what he was doing and tipped his head back to stare at the not-there-because-I'm-hallucinating-my-way-through-blood-loss canopy. "I'm arguing with Casper the Abercrombie Zombie." A beat later, "I'm arguing with my own pathology."

Boone smiled and continued toying with the moss. Sawyer saw that one of his fingers had been badly broken and the nail torn away, as if he had been scrambling for a grip on something and missed. Boone picked up a piece of the moss and threw it in the direction of Sawyer's ankle, the one that still burned and itched in turn for reasons that he could almost, but not quite, remember. "You were chosen." Boone flashed his eyes comically wide so that he could intone in a portentous voice, "You are the Chosen One." Much as Sawyer thought that he might have liked this version of Boone now that death had apparently removed the stick from up his ass, he was of half a mind to snap at him to stop quoting syndicated teenaged shows and come up with his own lines, before he reminded himself abruptly that none of this was real.

"We're imitating bad fantasy novels now. That's great, it really is." Boone continued to smile the eerie grin at Sawyer, making him falter for a moment before he was able to speak. Boone's tongue protruded from his lips for a moment, letting Sawyer see that it had turned completely black. Sawyer sketched out a salute and stepped backwards. "Find another Frodo, buddy. I don't know what this is about, but I already know that I don't want to play." He turned to walk away, unsure of where the door leading out of the rabbit hole was located but determined to find it all the same.

"You took one." An invisible hand pushed a needle into Sawyer's spine, filling it with ice. He turned slowly to see that Boone had gone back to playing with the moss, lifting his hand now and again so that he could examine his finger as if it were something interesting that he had found in a Petri dish. He looked up when he realized that Sawyer was staring at him. "Did you really think that you could get away without giving one back?"

"What?" Sawyer asked, his voice hardly rising above a whisper. He felt all of the blood draining away from his face.

Boone looked back at him, calm and blank, and went back to his fiddling. Sawyer did not remember giving his legs the order to move, but a second later they were doing exactly that. He lunged around the fire and didn't even feel the heat. Another thing that he didn't feel: so much as a twinge of pain fro either of his wounds. As if he needed any other signs to tell him that there was something severely fucked-up in the state of Denmark. "What do you think you're talking about, boy?" He wasn't thinking of Australia; he would not allow himself to think about Australia. What he could think about was how satisfying it would be to put his hands around the Boone-thing's neck and throttle those words right past his lips. See what happened to hallucinations or whatever the good hell he was dealing with when you took their air away from them.

The cracking of a twig beneath someone's foot stopped him where he stood within a span of heartbeats, the sound of it somehow managing to echo and reecho until it could be compared to a gunshot. Sawyer would wonder later if he had really stopped because his attention had been drawn by the sound that should not have been nearly so loud, or if he had stopped because she had wanted him to stop, if she had been in control of it all from the very beginning.

Sawyer turned his head and watched a woman-a girl-some indeterminate mix of the two-come striding calmly out of the trees towards him. She could have been anywhere from fourteen to thirty-four, Sawyer realized, and he would not have been able to tell. Her face was as smooth and gleaming as an egg or a cheap doll, lacking even the few distinguishing marks that would have made her beautiful or ugly. Sawyer felt a shiver running up his spine, looking at that thing. He glanced back and saw that Boone was watching her with a smile of bitter recognition on his face.

"Hello, Sawyer," the female said, pushing a few strands of dark hair that reminded Sawyer for a moment of Kate away from her face. He single unique feature, eyes the color of the sky on days when it was too hot for even the birds to move, gleamed for a moment with their own light.

"Well, hello there, princess," Sawyer answered back. Dream or hallucination or something in between, Sawyer wished that he had a cigarette. Never mind that he had torn through his last pack nearly a month previously. "It seems to me that I'm being offered a job here. You'll have to forgive me if I regretfully decline, though. Problems with authority, all of the old clichés."

"Not a job," the nameless female thing said, shaking her head so that her hair rippled across her shoulders and made Sawyer think for a moment of Medusa with her snakes. "Think of it more as a chance to repay a debt."

Sawyer once again felt his body go hot and cold by turns. He jerked backwards until he felt the press of bark against his back, even though the female thing was still several feet away. "You don't know a single goddamned thing about me," he whispered.

She glided closer, moving so smoothly that Sawyer wasn't sure if he had seen her legs scissoring back and forth at all, and Sawyer realized that his ability to move had been completely taken from him. The female thing, with those blue eyes that looked like bleach had been poured across the iris and turned Sawyer's own into drugstore baubles, came to Sawyer's side and pressed her lips tightly against the curve of his ear. It was the coldest kiss that Sawyer had ever received, and as he flinched away he heard her say, in a voice completely devoid of any human intonation, "Has it come back around yet?"

Sawyer lurched straight up on the pallet that he had been placed on, staring into darkness so thick that it was a living thing and feeling twin lines of fire opening up on his shoulder and his side. He heaved great gasps of air as sweat broke out all across his body, turning cold in an instant in the dense, humid air of the caves.

"Sawyer?" a voice asked, colored with a concern that Sawyer was in no condition to even make note of. There was a rustling off to his left, a female shape in the shadows that Sawyer could almost recognize, and then a pair of hands gripping at his shoulders and taking extra care of the wounded one. Slipping about in sweat as they were, to him they felt as cold as ice. He yelled something unintelligible and jerked away.

"Sawyer, Sawyer, easy, it's just me, Jesus-" It was not until a not of panic entered her voice and she turned her head to yell for Jack that Sawyer recognized her.

He fell back against the pallet, gasping, and asked, "Kate?"

End Part Nine


	10. Chapter 10

Part Ten

"Yeah, Sawyer, it's me. Who else did you think?"

The shadow that used Kate's voice settled back against a backdrop of rustling noises and what Sawyer now realized were the sounds of quite a few people moving about in the open caves beyond. There was a note of true worry in her voice. Now that the fog was fleeing from his brain, Sawyer wondered how he ever could have mistaken her for the other one at all.

"I was dreaming, that's all." Sawyer shifted, trying to find a more comfortable position, and then hissed as that turned out to be a mistake. His limbs all felt as if the blood had been siphoned away and replaced with liquid lead, it was agony to draw a breath any deeper than a shallow pant, and his shoulder and side…well, hell. They felt like two bullets had been put in and one freshly pulled out, that's way they felt like.

"I'll get Jack," Kate said quickly. Sawyer heard a noise of fabric moving against itself as she rose to her feet. He waved his hand, unsure if she could even see it in the gloom, and the sound ceased.

"No, I'm fine," Sawyer said. "I don't need to be prodded or cut on any more." He took a deep breath and slowly pushed himself up on his elbows. "Why are you sitting in the dark, anyhow?"

"Oh." Kate sounded embarrassed. "Jack said that you needed to sleep more than you needed anything else. I didn't want to disturb you."

Sawyer put his hand against his chest, where he could still feel his heart hammering away. "Think you missed that goal by an inch or two, Freckles."

"Hang on, I'll get a light." Kate hustled out of the cave and returned a moment later with a torch in her hand. She hacked at the dirt floor with a knife that she seemed to produce from nowhere until she managed to dig a fairly deep hole, placed the torch into it, and then swept the dirt back into place until it managed to stand on its own. As she set the knife to the side, Sawyer could not help but notice that it was one of Locke's.

"Oh, _Sawyer_," Kate drew his attention back onto her by whispering. She was staring at the bandage on Sawyer's shoulder and the strips of shirt that had been wrapped tightly around his ribs, as well as the purple and green bruises that drew a pattern across the rest of him. Add to that the-Sawyer touched gingerly at his face and neck-truly amazing sunburn that he was sporting and he was willing to bet that he made quite the pretty picture right about now.

"Don't get all cocky, you're not exactly looking like a cover girl yourself." Sawyer gave up on even attempting to sit and lay back so that he could watch the shadows moving across the ceiling. With light and human company, the things that he had seen were already fading until he really could convince himself that all he had done was dream.

"Yeah, but…" Sawyer could fell the air above his ribs move as Kate ghosted her fingers over the skin without quite being able to bring herself to touch him. After a second, she settled back. "This is what the Others did to you?" She laughed softly, apparently realizing how foolish that sounded, and said, "Of course it is, we're all used to you by now. Anyway, you're quite the subject of gossip out there."

"My favorite place to be." Sawyer turned his head to the side so that he could make eye contact with Kate and decided to see if that dazzling grin of his still worked. If the knowing shake of her head that Kate directed at him was any indication, then at the very least it was still recognizable.

Kate had brought with her one of the scraps of metal that they had been using as plates, Sawyer noticed, and piled it high with fruit and…actual boar meat? 'My, ain't luck fickle.' He didn't remember seeing her bringing it back with the torch, and he wondered if she had been sitting in the dark with it the entire time that she had been waiting for him to wake up. Sawyer pulled the plate towards him. His stomach flipped with the last remaining traces of the dream even as he was reminded of how long it had been since he had last eaten. "Sometimes you are one strange lady, Kate." Hot or cold, the boar was delicious.

"I'm a persistent lady." Kate reached out and stole a slice of mango from him. Looking almost shy, she licked a stray drop of juice from her finger and said, "I went down to the beach and picked up a few of your things for you. There wasn't a lot left, actually."

"I buried most of it." Sawyer ignored the huffing noise from Kate that he figured translated to 'Of course you did' and leaned over to see what she had brought for him. A stack of six paperbacks had been tucked back into the shadows so that he had not noticed them before, each one a book that he had not had the chance to read yet. An observant lady as well as a patient one. Sawyer flicked through them and felt himself beginning to smile in spite of everything else. "Freckles, you may have just saved my sanity." He was wondering if it would be worth the headache to crack one open right then and there when Kate dipped her head so that her curls fell down over her face and smiled, an 'I know something you don't know' smile.

"I'm not done yet," she said, and reached behind her. When she held his glasses out to him, Sawyer thought for a moment that he had to be seeing things. He told himself that if his fingers trembled slightly as he reached out to take them from her then it was because he was still exhausted and had just been through an experience that made a mockery of the expression 'hell of a day', not because he badly needed an outlet that could tell him that there was still a difference between reality and fiction.

"Where did you get these?" Sawyer demanded of Kate as he bent his head to examine the glasses in the flickering light. Other than a crack running down the line where the two frames had been soldered together, they were completely undamaged. There was an edge to his voice that made Kate lean back and regard him through puzzled, even hurt, eyes. "Did you go back to where Jin and I washed ashore for these?" When Kate continued to stare at him with that wounded expression without speaking, Sawyer snapped, "Answer me!"

"No," Kate said. "I didn't. For your information, they were still in the pocket of your own stupid shirt. They got tangled up in a loose thread, that's the only reason they didn't fall out." Kate leaned forward. Sawyer saw now that she was wearing that curious expression that she got sometimes, the one that could make even a cat look disinterested, and he swore inwardly. "You've only been asleep for a few hours, Sawyer. To hear Jin and Michael tell it, the place where you washed up is over a day's walk from here." She still wore that gleaming look. "Why don't you want me to go down there, anyway?"

Sawyer touched at the bandages covering his shoulder and side. "'Case you haven't noticed, sweetheart, it's not exactly safe for pretty things like yourself to go wandering around alone any longer." The tilt of Kate's head told him that she wasn't buying it. 'And because the monster that's had us all jumping and twitching on command for the past two weeks lives there,' Sawyer thought, wondering why he couldn't bring himself to just say that instead of feeling the need to put on a show. Maybe because he reckoned he knew Kate well enough by now to know that telling her about the monster's hidey-hole would be a bulletproof way of making her traipse off to see what she could see…and maybe because that knife that she had been using was making an uneasy feeling that Sawyer could neither explain nor shake away spread stealthily through his body.

"So Michael made it back?" he asked after a long pause, hoping to divert Kate away from whatever trail she was on the verge of heading down.

She nodded. "He must have landed right near you guys. It's a wonder that you didn't cross paths."

"And Walt?"

Kate shook her head, her eyes going dark and worried. "No. But we're going to find him."

"Yes," Sawyer said in a tone fierce enough to make Kate blink and lean back in surprise. It surprised him, too. "We are."

Kate reached out and rubbed at Sawyer's knee. "We're making plans right now. You should probably get some more sleep."

Sawyer could _feel_ himself going white, and with it he could see his final chances of getting Kate to release her curiosity going right down the tubes. "Think I've slept enough to last me a good long while, but thanks," he said.

Kate gave him a strange look. "Right. Is it too much of an understatement for me to tell you to feel better?"

"Yeah. But I appreciate it all the same." Sawyer tried to smile as Kate gave his knee a final squeeze and rose to her feet in one graceful movement. Her body was a brief silhouette in the doorway as she was backlit by the fires beyond, and then she was gone. She took Locke's knife with her, Sawyer noticed, but left behind the torch.

"Strange woman," Sawyer muttered again, hearing worry that surprised and even concerned him curling through his voice. He shook it off and finished his food quickly before he went pawing through the books that Kate had brought him. He didn't know why he hadn't just bundled them up and hidden them along with most of the other things that he hadn't taken with him, except that…well, books didn't do anyone a damned bit of good if they were locked away where no one could use them, did they? Even he knew that, and it wasn't as if he could trade them back and forth for useful things while he wasn't there. Even if this play he was having at being a decent human being was new and he wasn't entirely sure that he could make it fit yet, he figured that he could at least do that much.

Kate hadn't brought all of the books that he had been keeping stashed in his tent. There had to be at least a dozen in there that he hadn't touched yet, but she had sifted through to exclude all of the girlish titles, the Danielle Steel and the like, and brought up only the thrillers and the chillers. Sawyer felt a smile drifting back onto his face as he flicked through them. Someone had broken their mold when she popped out into the world.

Sawyer's hand stilled when he came back to the final book of the stack. It was a dark blue paperback bearing an illustration of a house on the cover in which one single upstairs window was lit. _Ghost Story_, by one Peter Straub. Sawyer had been looking forward to that one. It seemed to have lost some of its luster, now.

"Hello."

Sawyer jumped, swore, and put his hand quickly against his side. When he was sure that there were going to be no leaks of blood or internal organs into places where they didn't belong, he looked up. "_Baldy?_" Sawyer very nearly demanded, and only changed it to the more sedate, "Locke?" at the very last moment. Of all of the people that he had expected to visit him, the only way that he would have been more surprised would have been if Sayid had greeted him with a bouquet of roses.

Sawyer shoved _Ghost Story_ away from him and propped himself back up onto his elbows. He felt very suddenly that even if he weren't injured it would have been a matter of a farm dog facing a timber wolf. The feeling was gone a second later, leaving Sawyer to wonder where it had come from in the first place. Locke might be a creepy old man with a tendency to lie, but surely his stores of Kool-Aid had been running low after what had happened to Boone. It wasn't as if Sawyer was going to sign on the dotted line to be Locke's newest jungle friend, anyway.

Locke made an 'If you don't mind' gesture and waited for Sawyer's nod before he settled down onto the patch of earth that Kate had so recently vacated. He had to push Sawyer's book out of the way first. "What's the worst thing that you've ever done?" Locke asked softly, staring down at the yellow window on the book's cover, its single point of warmth in what otherwise appeared to be unremitting gloom.

Sawyer jerked, sending several small bombs going off beneath his side and especially his shoulder, and felt several of the stitches that Jack had so painstakingly dropped into the latter pop free. Warm blood began to trickle out to be soaked up by the bandages. Sawyer set his jaw and let several obscenities slide out from between his clenched teeth until the pain had subsided back to a manageable level. Outside of stretching his hand out to touch Sawyer on the shoulder and steady him, Locke watched with a faintly concerned expression but otherwise did not move.

"What did you just say to me?" Sawyer demanded when hew was reasonably sure that none of his limbs were going to fall off within the next few minutes.

"I said, 'What's the worst thing that you have ever done?'" Locke replied, withdrawing his hand and watching Sawyer through shrewd eyes. It occurred to Sawyer that a game was being played here, one that he did not know the rules of but had better learn quick if he wanted to avoid getting his ass handed to him. So far, his team of one wasn't doing so hot. Locke tilted his head towards the book. Sawyer felt his face begin to fill with blood. "It's been a few years since I read it, but if I recall correctly, that seems to be the theme of a lot of Straub's work, the way that the past finds ways to come back. It's a heavily used line."

"Is it now." If anything, Sawyer's urge to read the book shrank to an even lower level. He couldn't reach out and push it any further away from himself without becoming obvious, however. "I'm not really in the mood for horror, I don't think."

"I don't suppose that any of us are right now. I don't think we will be again for some time yet." Locke picked up the book from where it lay in the dirt between them and flipped to a page at random. He smiled at whatever he saw there. "Ah, Stella." Looking back up, he continued. "There are already so many ghosts on this island-" Sawyer did not twitch, not while he could see the way that Locke's eyes were tracking him over the top of the page. "And there are likely to be more before we bring this ugliness to a close." Locke shut the book and set it back down on top of the stack with the others. "I couldn't help but notice how strongly you reacted to that line."

Ah, so here it came. Sawyer's entire body went tense between one moment and the next, hurting like hell even though he couldn't seem to avoid it. Kate or even Jack would have gotten a simple 'Fuck off and mind your own business.' For Locke, Sawyer spared a politician's smile that he knew without needing a mirror made his eyes look that much colder by contrast. "Then you also couldn't help but notice that I haven't exactly spent the past few days in a spa. I reckon that if I want to be a bit twitchy right now, then I'm entitled to it."

Locke nodded. "I'm not disputing that. Stories of what you did on that raft are already being told around nearly every fire out there."

Sawyer wanted to laugh, and only by biting the inside of his cheek hard was he able to prevent himself from bursting into half-crazed mirth right then and there. He realized that Locke's eyes were making note of every he made and, without being able to quite say why, could not shake the feeling that he was both being campaigned to and scoped out as a member of enemy territory. "You're coming across as quite the hero."

"Every legend has to have some grain of truth somewhere, don't it?" Sawyer reached for a bottle of water that Kate had been so kind as to leave behind along with the good. He would have to remember to inspire that woman's domestic side more often. The water was delicious going down his throat, and he had to force himself to obey the doctor's orders and go slow before he made himself sick. When he finally set the bottle to the side, it was to discover that Locke was still watching him.

"I've heard that said," Locke replied. He settled his hands against his thighs, like a grandfather about to impart a story of great wisdom and import onto a gaggle of eager, wide-eyed youngsters. Sawyer found himself leaning forward in spite of himself. "I'm not certain that legends arise out of any relation to the truth, though, but because we need them in order to become better ourselves."

Sawyer made a face. "Thanks."

"What I do believe in," Locke continued as if Sawyer had not spoken, "are ghosts." He ignored Sawyer as he tried to simultaneously roll his eyes and tense up every muscle in his body as one being. "Not in the traditional sense, of course, not like-" He waved his hand towards the Straub novel. "That. But it is possible for a person to carry ghosts with them. This island is full of them, most of which we brought here on the plane with us."

This, finally, was something that Sawyer knew how to deal with. Sawyer narrowed his eyes into slits that he could barely see out of. "Am I going to see a golden retriever come trotting up any time soon?"

"No." Locke rose to his feet in a smooth, lithe movement that made Sawyer think, and not for the first time, that whatever it was that Mr. John Locke had done before their arrival to their happy home, it had been less than strictly legal. At some point they were going to have to round up all of the criminals on the island and sort out who did what. It would make for some hellacious campfire tales, at least.

The look that Locke bestowed upon Sawyer as he moved to exit the caves was not nearly so friendly as any that had come before it. There was a test being administered here, and Sawyer could not shake the feeling that he had failed. "Let me know if you see any boar, though. Kate and I got lucky earlier today. There's no guarantee that we will be again." He left.

Sawyer sank back onto the pallet as soon as he was gone, groaning. He touched at his shoulder, where a red rose had appeared on the bandage and was growing larger.

"Are you all right?"

Sawyer looked up. "Damn, but I'm popular tonight. Gonna have to schedule visiting hours for my own good before this is all over."

Jack made a face and stepped further into the cave. He cast a quick glance over his shoulder, almost certainly wondering what Locke had been doing in there a few minutes before. Jack looked back, not saying anything, but Sawyer could still read every thought going through the doctor's head as it was written across his face. It was a good thing that Jack was so upright and noble, because he couldn't lie worth shit.

"Jealousy is not a good color on you." This earned Sawyer another face, but a touch of the tension ran out of Jack's shoulders. More followed when Sawyer added, "And if you're here to give me a sermon, too, then I reserve the right to kick you right out of my hospital room."

Jack even smiled a little, then, and held up his hands in a mock gesture of surrender. "Just checking up on my patient." He stepped closer into the circle of torchlight, so that Sawyer could see, in spite of the stubble and the dark circles and the general signs that Jack was still trying to be Batman without the utility belt, the doctor was…in spite of everything that was going on, in spite of all the reasons that he had to be turning into the best spokesperson that Prozac ever could have hoped for, Jack was nearly glowing. The smile fell away when he saw Sawyer's shoulder, but the glow remained. Sawyer had the feeling that there were several blanks that were going to have to be filled in for him. "Look at you." He knelt by Sawyer's side and began pulling the bandage away.

"Think I popped some of those stitches that you were so nice as to put in," Sawyer said as he watched Jack work. Jack's fingers were long and slender, and they moved so softly that Sawyer barely felt them brushing across his skin. He exhaled a long stream of air through his nose. "You're good at this."

Jack threw him a bemused glance. "That's why they gave me the shiny degree." He smoothed some of the blood away from Sawyer's shoulder and leaned close so that his breath was a warm fan against the skin.

"And here I thought that it was like a kindergartner's finger painting and only good for tacking up on the refrigerator." Sawyer tilted his head back and grunted as Jack hit a spot that didn't much like being hit.

"How much pain are you in?" Jack's voice floated to him as those fingers continued their soft dance. Sawyer shivered and was glad that Jack would likely take it as a shudder of pain. What the good doctor was doing to his shoulder right about then was inviting way too many thoughts of what else those hands could be doing for Sawyer to stay inconspicuous for much longer.

"On a scale of one to ten?" With his head tilted back as it was, Sawyer felt rather than saw Jack nod. "Get a new scale."

"It's stopped bleeding," Jack said, more to himself than to Sawyer, and rocked back on his heels. "We have a few sedatives left," he began, but Sawyer could see the weight of the world already trying to resettle itself around Jack's shoulders. Sawyer waved him silent before he could complete the sentence.

"Not an emergency any longer, am I?" Sawyer asked, surprising himself by meaning it. 'Even legends…' Well, hell, if it was a chance to prove that creepy old coot wrong, then he would take it and do a little dance as soon as he felt up to it again. "Save it for the next poor bastard who needs his appendix taken out."

Jack ran his eyes over Sawyer's bared chest and abdomen without speaking. Sawyer could not tell if he was making note of the way that all of Sawyer's muscles had gone rigid with the pain or if he was only taking in the view. 'One epiphany at a time, old hoss.' Wasn't his fault if this one in particular was so much more appealing than the ones which had come before it. "Sun could make some more of that tea."

"No!" Sawyer all but shouted, realizing a second later that Jack was staring at him. A deep line of concern had drawn itself between his eyes. "No," Sawyer repeated more calmly. "I don't know what our very own medicine woman put into that witch's brew, but those were some of the most messed-up dreams that I've had for a while."

"Okay. That leaves aspirin as our last option."

"That'll do just fine." Sawyer held out his hand while Jack rummaged about in his pack for the bottle. When Jack shook four white pills into his waiting palm, Sawyer waggled his fingers for more.

Jack arched his eyebrows. "I don't have anything to put your stomach lining back together with if you start puking it up." Sawyer scowled and waggled his fingers again. "Uh-uh."

"I'd like to register my complaint about the bedside manner here." Sawyer popped the pills into his mouth and washed them down with a gulp of water.

"That's what the nurses are for." Jack's words were slightly muffled as he went back to digging through is bag, presumably for the sewing kit.

Sawyer propped himself up on his elbows so that he could watch the line of Jack's back through his shirt. "Surprised you're being so loose with the meds, anyhow. Somethin' you're not telling me, Doc?"

"You're going to outlive us all just for spite." Jack produced the sewing kit and, after a moment's more digging, one final tiny bottle of vodka. Sawyer stared at it and thought of all of the better uses that he could be putting that bottle to. "And maybe you're entitled to the extra aspirin. It's yours." Sawyer's jaw dropped open and he shot Jack a look of mingled shock and outrage. "You don't bury things half as sneakily as you think."

"Son of a bitch!" Sawyer snapped his mouth shut and glared. "I don't think that I like you very much." He paused for a long moment before he added, with great solemnity, "Jackass."

"You like me about as much as you like anyone, which is still more than you want any of them to know." While Sawyer was still mulling this over and wondering when he must have let it slip, Jack unscrewed the lid from the bottle of vodka and quickly doused both his hands and Sawyer's shoulder. He dropped his hand back down to Sawyer's forearm and gave it a brief squeeze when his patient winced. "You pulled out three stitches, looks like. Won't take more than a few seconds to put them back in." Jack readied his needle and thread. "It's going to hurt a little."

"We've already been through this song and dance once today, remember?" Sawyer braced himself. Compared to that impromptu surgery, a few stitches were nothing, and Jack's hands were gentle and quick.

"There," Jack said less than thirty seconds later. "That wasn't so terrible." He snapped off the thread and began redressing the shoulder.

"You keep saying that, and every time you're on the other side of the needle. Can't help but think that that might be affecting your viewpoint just a touch."

"I've had my share of good scrapes." Jack smoothed the fresh bandage down, his breath once more creating a warm breeze over Sawyer's skin, and damned if any pretense of self-control wasn't about to get thrown right out the window. Sawyer made a soft sound that Jack must have interpreted as one of pain, because his face was concerned when he lifted it back up. They were close enough to share one another's breath, and Sawyer only had to lean his face forward a centimeter or two before they were sharing something else entirely.

Jack's lips were warm, parted slightly, and pliant with shock. When he was not immediately showed away, Sawyer parted them further and slid his tongue inside. He waited for a signal from Jack as he explored, any sign at all urging him to either stop or egging him on, but in the few seconds since Sawyer had dipped his head down Jack seemed to have been replaced by a marble statue.

'Come on, Jack,' Sawyer caught himself thinking in a tone so close to pleading that he would never admit it to anyone. 'Haul back and sock me one if you want to, but you have to give me something to work with here.'

As if he had tuned into some secret wavelength that now allowed him to read Sawyer's thoughts, Jack made a slight sighing sound that made Sawyer think some burden had been lifted away, though he could not say how. Jack parted his lips further and brought his hands up to tangle through Sawyer's hair and pull him close with a ferocity that bordered on the painful.

Huh. Somewhere down the line, someone had taken the Captain America that Sawyer knew and loved to antagonize and turned him into a damned good kisser.

They parted at last so that they could breathe and rested the sides of their faces against each other, panting. Jack's stubble made a rasping noise against Sawyer's cheek as he moved. "What the hell." Jack shook his head as if to clear it. "What the hell was that?"

"Brother, I don't know," Sawyer said, and thought a second later that maybe he could have chosen a better endearment. He raised his hand to rub at his mouth, realized that this would look as if were trying to scrub Jack's taste away, and dropped his hand back in his lap. Jack's eyes were wide and nearly panicked. Sawyer could not imagine that he looked much different, and the picture of them staring at one another like a pair of startled owls was nearly enough to send him over the edge and into an absurd peal of laughter. "Jack," Sawyer began, not having much idea of what he even wanted to say. They hadn't punched each other yet, and as far as the two of them went that was a great leap forward in communication.

"You said earlier that you wanted to talk to me," Jack interrupted. "Somehow I don't think that this was what you wanted to talk to me about." His eyes were still wide. Sawyer thought that he was probably on the edge of bolting right then and there.

"No," Sawyer said, and then tried again. "Jack-" He didn't think that he had ever used Jack's name so often in so short a span of time before.

"I need some time to think this over," Jack said. His face was calmer, but he had scooted back several inches. There was a tension thickening the air between them now, different from any that had come before it. "So let's just focus on everything else that's happened today."

"Okay." Sawyer eased himself down off of his elbows. "Jin and I saw the monster."

Within a span of seconds, it was as if Sawyer was looking at a completely different Jack. He braced his hands on his thighs and leaned forward, eyes gleaming. 'Thought I would have a bigger impact than that,' Sawyer groused inwardly before he caught himself and nearly gave in to an absurd peal of laughter again. This did not yet qualify as the worst or even the most bizarre day of his life, but it was creeping higher on the list with every moment that ticked by. "Where?" Jack demanded.

Sawyer waved a hand to indicate that Jack should slow down. "Easy there, cowboy. Gonna tell this story, gotta tell it right." Jack made an irritated huffing noise that Sawyer decided he kind of liked and spoke Sawyer's tone in a warning tone. "Fine, fine. You have no sense of storytelling." Sawyer forced his tone to remain light and easy in spite of the fact that he and Jack were not quite managing to make eye contact. "About a day and a half's walk from here. Only a day if you're not phenomenally screwed up at the same time." Sawyer waved his good arm to indicate the damage done to his shoulder and side.

"What did it look like?" Jack asked. His voice had taken on a dry clinician's tone. Sawyer could imagine Jack turning right around and quizzing him about his prostate without breaking stride.

"Wasn't _it_, Jack. Was _they_." When Jack's face showed no glimmer of understanding, Sawyer went on. "They were a swarm of little things, each one maybe the size of one of my thumbs." He shrugged. "You might want to run the physics of it by Michael or Sayid to see if it checks out, but I got to admit that it would answer a lot of questions."

"It wasn't smoke at all," Jack said, half to himself. He only shook his head when Sawyer fixed him with a questioning look. "Did you see whether these…things…were animal or machine?"

"Couldn't tell," Sawyer said. "The opening in the ground that they disappeared into sure wasn't breathing, though." He tilted his head to side as Jack drew his breath in sharply. "Why are you so keen on the animal, vegetable, or mineral side of the equation? Practical guy like you, I'd have figured that you would be more interested in smashing it."

"We'll get to that," Jack said with a low, grim determination coloring his voice that made Sawyer straighten and look at him. "Do you remember any details of the boat that took Walt?"

Sawyer shook his head. "But I don't remember a lot of what happened that night."

Jack nodded as if this was to be understood. "It was modern." He stood up as Sawyer's eyes widened. "Ever since we came to this island, something has been playing with us. I think it's about time that stopped, don't you?" He left the cave without another word, presumably to settle into his bout of thinking. That was all right. Sawyer discovered that he had a lot to think about, too.

--

Most people had begun to drift off to bed in the little family clusters that had started to form, but in spite of the dwindling fires Sun did not think that she could sleep. She sat close beside her husband, holding his hand tightly in her own and resting her head onto his shoulder. Her knuckles had long since begun to ache with the strain, but neither of them as willing to be the first to let go. Every few seconds, Jin would raise his hand and gently comb his fingers through her hair.

"Am I hurting you?" Sun asked in Korean after they had sat for many minutes without speaking, indicating the fearsome burns that covered Jin's face and neck.

"No." Jin returned to stroking her hair. "You are a very good nurse."

"I have not done anything except feed you," Sun protested, feeling a blush crawl up her face. Jin had been able to make her flush with no more than a glance once, she remembered. She had loved those days.

"Yes, you did." Jin ceased stroking her hair long enough to put his arm around her shoulders and pull her close to him again. By splaying her palm against his chest, Sun could feel his heart beating. "You will take Jack's job away from him if he is not careful." He let a beat go by and then said, in a tone which was no longer playful, "I was afraid that I would never see you again."

"Me, too. I was frightened, too." Sun pressed her hand harder into Jin's chest, as if she would graft his heartbeat into her skin by willing it hard enough and keep it safe there. "You were all very lucky to have made it back. Even Michael." This last part Sun said carefully and in a low voice. She and Jin had never discussed the brief, confused attraction that she had felt towards Michael, or the friendship that he and Jin had formed since then. For several months before coming to the island, they had not discussed anything at all.

Jin stared at her for a long moment before he said, "Yes. Even him." He paused, sensing that she was not yet finished and waiting for her to go on.

Sun looked down at the place where their fingers were still intertwined. "I am afraid still," she said. "I am afraid of what is coming, and what may happen to you. Even thought you were only gone for two days, I could not sleep."

"You do not need to be-" Jin began, only to be cut off by Sun's lips meeting his. She kissed him with a ferocity and desperation that she did not believe she had ever felt before, and already she could feel tears rising in her eyes. Jin hesitated for a moment before he began kissing her back, raising his hands so that he could cradle her face. He barely touched her cheeks with the tips of his fingers, as if he thought that with too much pressure she might shatter.

"You do not need to be afraid," Jin said, breaking away so that he could look into her eyes. His hands did not leave her face, and already Sun could feel the blood rushing back into her face. "I will continue to be lucky."

Sun sniffled. She did not realize until Jin moved his thumb through the tear tracks on her face that she had been crying. "You cannot promise to be lucky."

"Yes, I can." Jin leaned forward and kissed her without ever taking his hands away from her face. He had used to kiss her like his on a daily basis in the first years after their marriage. Sun was breathing hard by the time that it was over. Jin gave her a questioning look, reminding her of the other things that they had used to do so frequently. She nodded, grasped her husband's hand, and led him away into the relative privacy just outside of the caves.

--

Sawyer did not know what time it was, only that he had not yet slept and the noises in the main cavern were finally beginning to die down, when a male shape darkened the entry into the infirmary cave. He recognized Jack's silhouette immediately. "You think fast."

"That's also why I have the degree." Jack's knees made a thunking sound as they struck the earth by Sawyer's side. Kate's torch had long since burned away into nothing, so that Sawyer was only aware of Jack's face as a dim, dark shape in the shadows before he was being kissed, kissed hard and kissed well. Jack's hand wound around to the back of Sawyer's head once more and seized a fistful of his hair, pulling Sawyer closer to him. Sawyer was tempted to say that the good doctor had a control fetish, but he hated to state the obvious and the distraction that he was being offered in its stead was much too nice to let his thoughts drift on to other things for long. Jack kissed him like a man who had not been kissed in a very long time or worse, did not expect to be kissed again. Sawyer decided that he liked the second interpretation better, as that way he could save himself the energy of being insulted.

"Don't flatter yourself. Doesn't take a degree to reach that conclusion," Sawyer said once they had broken apart.

"I couldn't sleep," Jack confessed. That wasn't exactly a new condition where the doctor was concerned, and the whole camp knew it. "Sayid's group hasn't come back yet."

It was news to Sawyer that a group had been sent out in the first place, but all right. He had certainly been worse things in his life than someone's pleasant distraction. "And you're looking for…?" His hand found the front of Jack's jeans in the dark.

"No, that's not it at all-" But he was not pulling away. Once Sawyer had undone the front of his jeans and slid his hand inside, he found quite an opposite reaction occurring. Jack cut off his words in favor of a soft sighing sound.

"Shh, don't worry about it." Sawyer spoke to himself almost as much as he did Jack. He had the feeling that this was new territory for the both of them. 'You've brought yourself off hundreds of times. Can't be all that different.' He spit into his palm before getting down to it.

Jack put his hand against Sawyer's good shoulder and squeezed hard as he came, hard enough so that Sawyer thought there might be bruises left behind in the morning. Add those to all of his others, and he wasn't certain that anyone else would even notice. "Better than a glass of warm milk, I'll bet."

He didn't have to see Jack's grimace to know that it was there; the shifting of the air told him so. "Maybe not the best analogy you could be making right now." He remained half-collapsed across Sawyer's body, close enough so that their whiskers were brushing against one another as Jack whispered, "I'm sorry."

"Sorry for what?"

"I'm taking advantage of you."

"Hell, Jack, I ain't exactly running away." They were whispering, and Sawyer was not sure why.

Jack's snorted laugh was no more than a puff of air against the side of Sawyer's neck. "Sawyer, you're not exactly in the shape to be running anywhere right now."

"That's it. Get off of me, you son of a bitch." Sawyer shoved at Jack's chest with his good arm and was not stilled until he heard the zipper of his jeans being drawn down.

Jack's voice was a low rumble against his ear. "Am I still taking advantage of you if we both get off?"

"You tell me." Sawyer arched when Jack found a rhythm and then winced when his bruises and his broken ribs scolded him. "Might have to go easy on me."

"It's what I do." Sawyer put his hand over Jack's, guided him to the rhythm that Sawyer liked best, as Jack put his mouth over Sawyer's again. Jack was a smart man and a quick study, and when Sawyer came a few minutes later, whatever he might have said was lost into Jack's mouth.

Jack rested his head against Sawyer's forehead while Sawyer caught his breath. They couldn't meet one another's eyes in the darkness, and maybe that was just as well. This was the part of the game where Sawyer would find a good exit line and then bolt away into the sunset, usually with a great deal of money that he had done next to nothing to earn riding shotgun with him. Jack was right, though, when he said that Sawyer wasn't in the condition to go running anywhere. That left it to the doctor to make the clever escape, then.

Jack hesitated and remained poised over Sawyer's body for a few seconds longer before he rolled over to the side. "You could use the extra sleep, too," he said at last.

Sawyer snorted. "Not really in the mood, trust me." He could sense Jack watching him with some concern, but both of them were too preoccupied with the moment when one would tell the other to leave to allow for much else. They were still waiting for that moment when Jack's breathing became deep and regular, while Sawyer remained wide awake and watching the dark.

End Part Ten


	11. Chapter 11

Part Eleven

The sun was hanging low on the horizon, and Shannon did not know where she was. This would not be so bad under normal circumstances unless she was wandering around the jungle by herself, but she had the sneaking suspicion that Sayid did not know where he was, either. There was only one mental category that she could file that little revelation under: Very Bad. When she thought of all the creepy mojo and _Apocalypse_ _Now_ antics that had been going on on Craphole Island all day long, and Shannon even thought that another 'Very' might be in order.

She wrapped her arms around herself, watched the back of Sayid's neck as he strode a few paces ahead of her, and asked herself for perhaps the millionth time since they had started out just what she thought she was doing. She was not a hero. This was not a thought shot through with self-condemnation; with rare exception, Shannon was not the sort of girl who spent hours staring into her navel and contemplating all of her past wrongs. This happened, she coped with them, and it didn't do anyone any good, including herself, if she couldn't pick herself up and keep moving afterwards. She could be nice-well, she _could_-but she was never going to be selfless, not in the way that Jack could and she thought that Kate wanted to be, where she completely forgot that an individual person with distinct needs was even there. It just wasn't in the programming, and Shannon was nothing if she hadn't made herself into a realist.

And all of that still did nothing to help her figure out what she was doing there, traipsing along through a patch of jungle that she had never seen before behind Sayid and the other scary Army guy. They were the only two carrying guns, having left the other two back at the caves just in case something happened. Shannon was kind of getting the feeling that she and the other two had been allowed along on this trip only because Sayid was too much of a gentleman to turn down willing hands when they were in short supply. Shannon wasn't sure that she disagreed with his assessment, either, and had to wonder what she was trying to prove here, who she thought she was proving it to.

She dropped her hands back to her sides and heaved a sigh loud enough to make Sayid pause and look back at her with raised eyebrows and a concerned expression. Scary Army Guy halted in his steps as well, giving Shannon the look that he had been flashing her all afternoon, the one that asked her what she thought she was doing there. As Shannon had seen him flashing a similar one to the other two on more than one occasion, she curled her lip slightly and decided that she was not going to let it get to her.

"Are you all right, Shannon?" Sayid asked.

Shannon realized that everyone was staring at her by this point. She normally preferred to be holding court for more flattering reasons. "I'm fine," she said. When Sayid continued to look at her in that steady, unshakeable way that he had, she added, "Really, I'm okay. Just, um…" There was no way that she could say this without looking like the wee socialite who could not hold her own when she was placed on a mission with real importance. Shannon paused, mouth snapping shut, before she felt a line of liquid steel being injected into her vertebra. And when had she ever given a damn about what someone else thought of her? Not for years, at least. She lifted her chin. "It's getting dark. Didn't we say that we were going to be back by then?"

Army Guy exchanged a glance with Sayid that Shannon supposed was meant to be one of commiseration. She could count on both hands all the ways in which she did not care. Sayid, however, was giving her that look again, the one that she had never received from any man before him. It was a look that Shannon alternately loved and loathed, because it made Shannon feel as if Sayid was somehow staring into the core of her and finding something in there better than she even thought she could be, something that he could not look away from.

After a long pause, Sayid nodded. "Come here, Shannon." He gestured her forward, then pointed at a place on a nearby tree just about level with her chin. "Do you see this?"

Shannon leaned forward to look where Sayid indicated, bracing her hand against his shoulder to steady herself. He gripped her wrist until she found her balance again and did not let go again for several seconds. Shannon shook off the pleasurable gooseflesh that wanted to roll over her and touched the deep gouges in the bark that she had not noticed until Sayid pointed them out to her. Now that she was seeing them, she wondered how she ever could have missed them. Shannon slid her forefinger into the marks and watched as it disappeared up to the first knuckle. The edges of the gouges were charred, making them much darker than the surrounding mark. Shannon drew her hand back and rubbed the sap against her fingers. "Did an animal do this?"

She could feel Sayid's curls brushing against her shoulder as he shook his head; the careful knot that he had placed his hair in had worked free within the first hour. Shannon had not realized until that point how close he was standing. "The polar bears might be tall enough to cause a mark this high up," he said. "But do you see these?" He reached out and touched the same burns that Shannon had noted a few moments before. "Unless we have a dragon running about, there is no way that an animal could have done this."

"On this island?" Shannon heard Scary Army Guy's friend asking from a few paces behind them. "I'll put ten dollars down right now that it's a dragon."

Sayid's lips turned up slightly, but his eyes never left Shannon's. "So it had to have been some kind of machine," Shannon finished, putting her fingers back into the gouges. She wasn't positive that she was not imagining it, but the sap still felt warm to her.

"We can still turn back," Sayid said. His tone was gentle. "We can get the rest of the camp, return in force."

Shannon rubbed the sap against her forefinger and thumb. She wasn't crazy, it was definitely still warm. How had something large enough to leave gouges that high on the tree managed to get through without any of them seeing or hearing anything? The voice of reason piped up in Shannon's head, saying that maybe Sayid was right, maybe now was the time for all of them to back off and think things over.

"No," Shannon said after a long internal debate with herself. She set her jaw. "We have guns-" 'So did Sawyer.' "-and they might still be close. If we find out where the Others are, then we can come back with more people, but there's no guarantee that we'll get this trail again." She might not be a hero, but the kid had trusted her with his dog. Back in the real world, most people didn't even trust her to watch the remote control.

Sayid squeezed her shoulder. Shannon thought that she even detected pride in the gesture. "Come on." He thumbed the safety off on his gun. A few paces away, Scary Army Guy did the same thing.

"Do you need any help carrying your pack?" Matthew whispered to her. It was the third time that he had asked since they had started out. His Midwestern accent grew even thicker when he spoke to her, and it was only about once every thirty seconds that he managed to meet her gaze.

Shannon rolled her eyes and stared straight ahead, managing to keep herself from sighing only through an extreme act of will. She thought that she saw Sayid casting an amused glance her way. If the situation had not been so serious she would have run over and socked him one in the arm for it.

"No, Matthew, I think I can manage my ten pound backpack," she said wearily. Off of Matthew's briefly hurt look, she added. "But thank you for asking. Again." Six weeks ago she would not have done even that much, and probably would have thrown in a few scathing remarks besides. Shannon preferred to think of it as personal growth. She stepped up close to Sayid's side so that she could twine her fingers into his free hand.

"Hey," Scary Army Guy's friend-was his name Bill? Shannon hadn't bothered to ask-spoke up a moment later, "does anyone else smell that?" Matthew took a step sideways and looked at him warily, but he insisted, "No, I'm serious. It smells like…motor oil?"

Shannon was ready to roll her eyes in the same way that she had at Matthew a few moments before and throw in a few mean remarks besides, when out of nowhere she thought that she smelled something, too. She had never deliberately smelled motor oil or even placed herself in a mechanic's garage where she could catch a whiff of it firsthand, but she could remember when Boone had been a sophomore and she had been a freshman, when the boy ritual of being able to tinker around with a car had become all-important. God, she had laughed at him, asking what the hell the rich boy thought he was trying to prove, pretending to be a mechanic when everyone at the school knew that he could just _buy_ a new car pretty much every time that he wanted one. Shannon's stomach clenched as she remembered it. She had been unable to dance due to a hamstring injury, she had been feeling particularly depressed and useless all that winter, and Sabrina had been in fine form, but that was not an excuse. The way that Boone's clothes had smelled every time that he came back inside, though, had been the same.

For a moment they all stared at one another, four deer in the light of an oncoming car that none of them could even really see, let alone hope to dodge. The silence was clear and wrenching, and from far off Shannon thought that she could hear the sound of water running.

Then the birds began to scream and the trees began to shake, and these were sounds that they had all been trained in a very short amount of time to have strong reactions to.

Sayid jerked as if he had been struck by electricity. "It's coming!" he yelled, a ferocity in his voice that made Shannon feel as if she had just been given a good zap with the taser, too. She twitched and covered her mouth and nose with her hand as the smell of grease and machines that had been no more than a hint on the air a few seconds before now swelled to become overpowering. Every breath that she drew felt like Jello being sucked down her lungs, and from the corner of her eye she saw Matthew lean over and begin retching. A wire-thin trail of saliva ran from his lower lip to the ground. "Get under cover, everyone!" Sayid pulled hard at Shannon's arm when she did not move quickly enough to satisfy him, gesturing to Matthew with the hand that still held the gun. The youth shook his head and, swiping at his mouth, ran over to join them, while Scary Army Guy and his buddy bolted off in the other direction.

Sayid did not wait for Matthew to reach them before he whirled around and dove into the underbrush. Over her own panicked wheezings and the sound of her feet and heart pounding in time, Shannon could hear Matthew running only a few yards behind her. The trees all around them were shaking now; leaves fell down to catch in Shannon's hair as she dashed beneath the branches. 'Why isn't the ground shaking?' Shannon thought with a surreal kind of clarity, like a snapshot taken slightly out of focus. There was no time to wonder about that now, or about much of anything else except for moving those legs that had served her so well on the dance stage and had had track coaches eyeballing her from the age of twelve to eighteen. Her breath rasped in her throat. 'Oh, Jesus, not now, not now, you can have an attack any time but now.'

Shannon felt rather than heard the trees directly behind her parting in the face of some incredible force. The loudest sound in her ears was the roaring noise created by her own blood rushing by. When Shannon opened her mouth to scream, the only sound that could find the air to emerge was a high, breathless whistle. She did not need to pause or turn her head to know that Matthew would not be behind them any longer if she looked.

"Don't, Shannon," Sayid panted from beside her, timing the words to sync up with the pattern of his steps. "Don't look, there is nothing there that you need to see."

It was excellent advice, and Shannon intended to follow it to the letter. She _hated_ splatter films, Boone had used to torture her about it mercilessly, she couldn't even look at a raw chicken breast without feeling queasy-

Something hot and wet splattered against Shannon's pack, against the back of her neck and into her hair, and Shannon's ailing lungs found that they could draw in the oxygen for a good, long scream, after all. Shannon didn't give in to the urge to pause for an Oscar-worthy freak out, tempting though it was, knowing that if she did so it would likely be her last. Her lungs and legs continued to burn, but she clenched Sayid's hand hard enough to leave barely-traceable bruises across the skin later and ran on.

Shannon did not watch horror films, one of the only notes of conformity that she failed to hit with the popular crowd during her entire high school career. If she had, she likely would have been far more exasperated with herself when he toe caught on a tree root and dragged her straight down to the ground. There was nothing that Shannon despised more than being a cliché. She hit the ground with an 'Oof' noise and felt all of the air rushing from her lungs. He hand was dragged from Sayid's.

Shannon rolled over onto her backside and scrabbled backwards, already feeling herself start to go bug-eyed with terror. She anticipated golden eyes and long, slavering fangs, all of those things that she could build in her imagination but not stand to see on the big screen. What she did not expect to see was a swarm.

"What?" Shannon gasped, all of the fear momentarily shocked out of her. Huge as the great black cloud was, it paused as well, as if it was startled to actually be seen. Or maybe it was just pausing so that it could savor the moment.

'This is why I don't watch horror movies,' Shannon thought in another one of those eerie Polaroid moments. 'I can come up with much better on my own.' Sayid's hands appeared beneath her arms, scaring her so badly that she leapt off of the ground without his help. He was still holding the gun, Shannon noticed, though he seemed to have forgotten that it was there. "Why don't you shoot it?"

"Shoot at which part?" Sayid fired back. He jerked her backwards against his chest at the same moment that the monster, monsters, whatever, grew tired of feasting its eyes and lunged forward to feast…wherever the hell its mouths were. Dirt sprayed up from the place where Shannon had been crouching only a second before and stung her face. "This way!" Sayid started to tug her forward.

"No!" Shannon balked, aware as she did so that every second she wasted could be the last one that they had. Sayid stared at her as if he could actually see her taking her sanity from her head and setting it down on the ground. "I heard water!"

As Shannon watched, the lights went on behind Sayid's eyes. He nodded, Shannon reclaimed his hand, and off they went. The monster uprooted a tree directly behind them, sending branches and bark flying everywhere. Shannon shrieked as splinters peppered her shoulders and the backs of her legs. As they scrambled to get out of the path of further shrapnel, Shannon could not escape the feeling that the thing, whatever it turned out to be, was throwing things at them deliberately. The thought that it might be intelligent was the most frightening one of all.

"Where did you hear the water?" Sayid yelled at her, still barely audible over the din that was taking place half a step behind them.

"I…" Shannon fought back an urge to falter to a stop and spin around until she got her bearings back, knowing that if she paused now she was going to get them both killed. So long as they were moving, regardless of the direction that they were actually going in, all of their major body parts were going to stay where they belonged for a little while longer.

But it was so _dark_, and with the adrenaline rushing through her body and making all of her perceptions seem acidic and out of focus, Shannon could no longer be certain that she had heard anything at all. She set her jaw. 'Freak out later.' Shannon had the feeling that she was making one hell of a promise to herself with that one. 'Focus now.' "I think it's this way." Shannon tugged Sayid along with her in a new direction, leaping over a fallen log that she could barely see in the gloom but would have broken her ankles if she had collided with it all the same. The monster, which had until that point been hanging a few paces behind, lunged forward in earnest pursuit again. Whether it had been toying with them or attempting to herd them, Shannon discovered that she did not want to know.

When her foot struck something soft and yielding in the dark, Shannon found that she had the breath left in her for one more scream, after all. She broke contact with Sayid long enough to leap sideways, feeling her hand collide with a tree that she saw as no more than a dim silhouette in the dark. Her ring finger broke like a pencil in the hands of a careless child and the pain was bright, brilliant, and threw her mind into a clarity that she had never experienced before. Shannon clutched her hand to her chest and made a soft, wounded rabbit sound, too shocked to even scream again. She had a feeling that they had found out what had happened to Scary Army Guy and his buddy after they had split away.

"I can hear the water!" Sayid yelled, grabbing at Shannon's arm to get her moving again. She gasped as her newly broken finger was jarred, sending fresh agonies rolling all the way into her shoulder. Sayid shifted into a more gentle grip in response, but there was no time to slow down.

There was a tremendous splintering sound and a gust of air from behind them as the monster came down on the exact place where Sayid's voice had been coming from only a second before. Shannon felt like laughing, if she could have found the room for it around her wheezing. So the thing was not infallible. Thank God; Shannon had began to feel as if they were being pursued by an amorphous version of the Terminator.

They burst out the cover of the trees into clear moonlight at last. A pond of water about one hundred yards in diameter glittered before them, fed by one stream while the excess water tumbled away over a cliff in another. It was the sound of the waterfall that had led them there, and Shannon thought that it was a small miracle that they had not run right over the edge of the cliff in their mad dash. Shannon's heart constricted in her chest, one small spasm of grief that she could not afford but could also not avoid.

The feeling of those Godawful things wrenching at her backpack, trying to pull her right off of her feet, was as effective as a slap to the face in getting her focused again. Rather than lunging forward in a blind panic, Shannon twisted like an eel, leaving the backpack behind with a speed that would have had the basketball coaches giving her eyes right along with the track coaches if they had been there to see it. She looked over her shoulder and was treated to the bizarre sight of her pack dangling in the air without her body in it, held up by the black cloud. She snapped her head back around and used the last bit of her energy in following Sayid towards the water.

Shannon dove beneath the pool's surface headfirst just as her old diving instructor had once told her, using her hands to part the water so that she could slide through it like a knife. Her injured finger was bent back at an angle that nature had never intended it by the force with which she struck the water, blackening Shannon's vision and causing her to suck water down into her lungs as she tried to cry out. She bobbed back to the surface, coughing and sputtering. Sayid was treading water only a few feet away. One side of his face was rapidly growing dark with blood from a cut in his cheek that Shannon had not noticed over the course of their mad dash. In the cold moonlight, it looked as if he had tar welling up from his skin.

"Sayid," Shannon gasped, paddling the few remaining feet over to him. Every movement of her hand brought fresh tears of pain into her eyes.

Sayid turned a wide-eyed, alarmed gaze onto her when he heard the sound of her voice. "Shannon, be quiet!" he hissed, as Shannon realized that that terrible buzzing sound was filling the air again. She took a deep breath and ducked beneath the surface of the water. Looking up through the scant moonlight that came down through the water, Shannon was able to watch as the light broke into a thousand stars when the monster struck the surface of the water and then skimmed away again. 'It can't dive in after me,' Shannon thought. The horrible thing had so few other weaknesses that they had seen thus far, so she clung to this one for all that she was worth.

Shannon lurked beneath the surface until her lungs were burning and dark spots were dancing in front of her eyes before cautiously swimming back up to the surface. Sayid was treading water a few feet away again, his hair wet as if he too had dove beneath the surface when the thing struck. He swam over to Shannon's side and rubbed at her back as she tried to control the sound of her wheezing. "It's all right," he told her in a voice that nevertheless did not rise above a whisper. "I don't think that it will come close to the water again. It knows now that it can't."

"You mean that it's _smart_?" Shannon gasped. Even though she had been wondering about that herself, it sounded worse when Sayid said it. A dark black cloud hovered about a dozen feet above the surface of the water. She could not shake the feeling that it was waiting.

"I think it may be." Sayid put his arm around Shannon's shoulders and pulled her as close as he was able while still allowing them both to tread water. Shannon reached out with her good hand and swiped a small, struggling thing from the water, holding it close so that she could see it in the small amount of light filtering through the clouds that had begun to pile up in the sky above them. She stared at a robotic thing slightly larger than her own thumb, perhaps as large as Sayid's, barrel-shaped and with a series of rotating, teeth-like blades on either end. Shannon let out a cry of pain and disgust as one of the teeth bit into her finger and dropped the little abomination into the water, where it disappeared from sight. She stuck her wounded digit into her mouth.

"That's one mystery solved, at least," Sayid muttered, staring up at the clouds. His hand tightened around Shannon's shoulders. Shannon was not sure that he was even aware of the gesture.

"Are we stuck here until it gets bored?" Shannon asked, snuggling closer to Sayid.

"I think we might be," Sayid answered. His hand tightened again.

From far off in the jungle, bobbing points of light could be seen.

Sawyer stood on the far shore, shrouded by trees that blocked even the sparsest amounts of moonlight from reaching him. They shivered in an out of focus from one moment to the next, letting Sawyer know that he was in another one of his fun dreamscapes. Gosh, but the first one had been such a laugh riot, how could it be that he was failing to be amused by the second one?

He folded his arms over his chest and felt a deep frown line drawing itself between his eyes as he watched Shannon and Sayid struggle out on the water. The smell of motor oil was still heavy and thick on the air. "Nice light show," he said to the blue-eyed female thing standing beside him. Boone was not present. "You should direct movies. Doesn't mean that you ain't just making it up, though, or that it will do you a damned bit of good in roping me into your little game." Sawyer parted his lips into a dangerous smile. "I'm a touch twitchy about being manipulated these days, but I'm sure that you already know about all of those sticky little details. Go talk to Baldy, he seems kind of into it, though."

"You have to give one back. They'll all die if you don't, including that boy, and don't you think you've done enough of that?" While Sawyer sucked in his breath sharply, the female thing folded her arms over her chest and stared him down. "Get off your ass," she said coldly.

End Part Eleven


	12. Chapter 12

Part Twelve

Jack was not used to waking up slowly. On more than one occasion he had skipped the waking up part altogether, having worked all the way through the night on one problem or another. When he did find time for rest, he generally snapped back from it wide-awake from one second to the next, already looking for the next problem. So, no, he was not the sort to laze about and watch Sunday mornings turn into Sunday afternoons.

Jack opened his eyes and stared up at the roof of the cave, becoming confused when it was not the same pattern of rock that he had been staring up at for nearly a month. A bit more of the fog lifted from his brain as Jack realized that the sunlight curling into the cave was a far richer butter-yellow than the one that normally greeted him when he woke up. "What time is it?" Jack muttered to no one in particular, sitting up to rub at his eyes. When his elbow impacted warm flesh, he froze. The lingering feeling of waking up slowly vanished before it had time to really begin.

As soon as Jack touched him, Sawyer lurched straight up on his pallet, wide-eyed and panting. He put his hand to his side as soon as he was fully awake and the pain caught up with him and spit out a string of obscenities so long and garbled that Jack could only make out one word out of every three. Few of them were flattering. Jack felt his eyebrows crawling up towards his hairline.

"Um," Jack tried, putting his hand against Sawyer's shoulder to steady him before he pulled the stitches out all over again. He didn't have a lot of experience with one night stands. It was possible that there was a skill to this.

Sawyer shot him a look filled through and through with poison, though Jack wasn't sure that the hate had anything to do with him. "Fucking blue-eyed bitch," Sawyer muttered, dragging his hand through his hair, and Jack's eyebrows climbed even higher. Not once, he noted, did Sawyer make any move to twitch Jack's hand away.

"Pleasant dreams?" Jack asked, mostly for the sake of having something to say. While he felt more rested than he could remember in weeks, Sawyer had deep circles painted beneath his eyes and small indentations worn into the flesh of his lower lip, as if in his sleep he had been chewing at it.

Sawyer threw another glare Jack's way, and this time he could be sure that he was actually the intended target. "Like a lamb," Sawyer snapped, seeming to realize that Jack's hand was on him for the first time. He carefully removed it from his shoulder, pressing his thumb directly into Jack's palm for a moment. Jack curled his fingers around Sawyer's wrist and felt the blood rushing beneath the surface. His skin warmed. 'Really not good at one night stands.'

"Oh, Jesus," Sawyer said, noting the way that Jack was looking at him. There was still a faintly glazed look to his eyes, as if he was still looking for something to fight and Jack just happened to be the best thing available. "This isn't the part where we question our sexuality and talk about our feelings, is it? End it all with a manly hug?"

The blood that had been pooling in Jack's hand and, to be fair, a few other places fast-tracked its way into his face. "No," he said, pulling his hand away from Sawyer's grasp. "This is the part where I thank you for being a good lay and get the next dose of your antibiotics." Jack tipped an imaginary hat in Sawyer's direction and made as if to get up to his feet.

Sawyer looked briefly shocked, then grinned. He leaned back against the pallet and rubbed his hand over his face. "Damn, Doc. Never figured you for the love 'em and leave 'em type. Guess I learn something new every day."

"Guess we both did." Sawyer's eyebrows quirked upwards, but he let the opportunity for color commentary pass. Jack stood and, placing his hands into the small of his back, arched to relieve some of the ache put there by the cave floor. "In case you haven't noticed, Sawyer, you tend to take people's better instincts from them and hide them wherever you keep all the rest of your stash."

"Yeah, but you didn't seem to have much trouble finding that," Sawyer grumbled. He rubbed his hand over his face again, pulling an expression as if he found something disgusting there that he could not quite rid himself of.

"Did you sleep all right?" Jack asked, mentally giving himself a kick. When Sawyer looked up at him, he clarified, "You kicked me several times last night."

Sawyer grimaced. "That crap Sun gave me after you were done playing Operation. It's been giving me dreams." Jack's eyebrows pulled together in a concerned line, but Sawyer was fishing around for his shirt and did not see it. "Sorry," Sawyer said at long last and in a grudging tone of voice. He found a shirt and slipped into it, looking up at long last so that he could give Jack a smile too angelic and winsome to be real. "If it helps your ego any, you weren't so terrible yourself."

"Thanks." Jack snorted. "You're a darling. How are you feeling this morning, anyway?"

"Like I got shot and then run over by a boat, what do you think?" Sawyer groused. He noted the way that Jack was looking at him and sighed. "Just be liberal with the aspirin, all right?" Sawyer finished buttoning up his shirt and looked around the cave again. His eyes lit up when he saw his boots.

"Oh, no, you're not going to go moving around for at least a day or two," Jack said. He reached out with his foot and pushed Sawyer's boots out of reach. "Not until you're caught up on blood and sleep." Sawyer gave him a stubborn look, but before he could snap something back they both heard a feminine voice calling Sawyer's and Jack's names.

"Sawyer, is Jack in here?" Kate appeared in the doorway of the infirmary cave and flushed a deep scarlet, ducking her head and stepping partway out again. "Sorry, I didn't think that I was…interrupting anything."

Jack realized after a moment's confusion what it was that Kate meant. Of the two of them, the one currently shirtless was not the one that Kate had probably expected. Sawyer smirked and, after a moment of rummaging around behind him, came up with Jack's tee shirt. He threw it towards Jack and then leaned over, wincing and muttering obscenities beneath his breath, to hike up the leg of his jeans and look at his ankle. Jack saw a frown line flicker between Sawyer's eyes, but he really wasn't interested at the moment. He quickly pulled his shirt back over his head. "Kate, I-"

She waved her hand at him. "None of my business, Jack, really. I should have knocked on the…rock, or something." The blood had still not drained away from Kate's face, but now that the shock was wearing off Jack could see a deep well of hurt coming up to take its place.

Jack looked to Sawyer for help, hoping against hope that he would use that tongue of his for good rather than evil for once. Sawyer, however, was engrossed in whatever it was hat he had found on his ankle. By craning his neck, Jack was able to see a ring of dark purple bruises circling the skin. Given that the rest of Sawyer's body was peppered with similar marks, Jack did not see what it was about this particular set that warranted the intent, almost hungry expression on Sawyer's face. Seeing that no aid was going to come from that quarter, Jack turned back to Kate. "I'm sorry, I don't think that either one of us planned for this."

Kate barked out a laugh, still wearing an expression that did not know whether shock, anger, or hurt was supposed to dominant. "Okay, I don't even know which 'either of us' is being addressed here." She shook her head, rubbed at her eyes, and went through a half-dozen other different fidgeting rituals as she tried to get her composure back. Jack, unsure of what he was supposed to do when she had so clearly spoken the truth, remained quiet so that he could give her at least that much. There had been a tension running between all three of them since the very first days after the crash, first with Kate standing at the apex but then gradually shifting until, looking back now, Jack realized that it had been weeks since any of them had been the single dominant object of desire.

When viewed in that light, the whole 'one night stand' plan seemed less likely to work by the second, and not least because being trapped on an island didn't leave any of them with a lot of places to run to.

"And no one here owes anyone anything," Kate continued. "Except that now maybe you and Sawyer owe each other something-" She shut her mouth with an abrupt clacking sound. "There's no way to end this conversation gracefully, so I think I'll cut my losses and just end it."

"You're getting yourself awful worked up over nothing there, Freckles," Sawyer said, smoothing the leg of his jeans back down. All of the blood seemed to have evacuated from his face. Jack thought that he was speaking from a script that he only half remembered or understood. "Much as I get a kick out of seeing you blushing so pretty, ol' Doc here was just doing his duty and checking on his patient." Sawyer rolled his shoulder and winced when the motion was too much. It pulled some animation back into his face, and for that Jack was glad. Sawyer was still wearing an expression around his eyes as if he had been struck hard with a two by four seconds before and still wasn't entirely sure what he meant to do about it. "Making sure I don't die as soon as I get off the operating table."

Kate's face softened; she still looked as if there were about a thousand other places on the planet that she would rather be in that moment, many of them filled with lava. "You're a good liar, Sawyer," she said, "but you're off your game today." She tried to smile at Jack and he saw that, though she might be a liar accomplished enough to put all of the rest of them to shame, Sawyer was not the only one having a bad day. The way that she reached for his hand and squeezed it still felt genuine. "Take care of yourself, Jack."

Sawyer had pulled Jack's pack over to him in the background and was digging through it, presumably for the aspirin. "Don't poison yourself," Jack told him, and was given a nonchalant middle finger in return. There was still a tightness in the planes of Sawyer's face that made Jack think of an actor soldiering on in spite of the fact that his role had long since ceased to amuse him, and he thought that if there had been any alcohol left in the pack Sawyer would not have bothered with the aspirin at all.

Something in Jack's tone must have betrayed him, because Kate's entire face froze, turning her into someone else entirely. To avoid the awkward silence that seemed determined to stalk up on them whether they liked it or not, Jack asked her gently, "You were looking for me?"

Kate startled hard and clapped her hand over her mouth, a look of pure horror crossing her features. The last shred of something nice, maybe even something normal, fled the cave with its tail between its legs. Even though he could not predict her exact words, Jack was sure that whatever Kate was going to say next would make sure that the normalcy did not come back for a good long time, if ever. "I came in, and then I saw the two of you, and-never mind." Kate cut herself off by making a savage chopping motion through the air. "Shouldn't have gotten distracted." Jack waited impatiently for her to go on. "The group that Sayid went out with yesterday afternoon. They haven't come back yet."

Normalcy made a yipping sound as it was hunted down and fatally wounded. Sawyer had stopped going through Jack's pack and was sitting with the aspirin bottle in his hand, watching them through narrowed eyes and trying to put together all of the parts of the story that he had not been conscious for. Jack felt as if every drop of blood in his body had fled for parts unknown, leaving only ice in its place. And with the ice, clarity of a fierce kind that he had never known before. "What's going on now?"

"That's why I came to find you," Kate said. A bit of defiance and 'So there' had come into her voice, reminding Jack of their argument from two nights before. "Locke's organizing another party to go rescue the rescuers." She lifted her eyebrows slightly, asking Jack to take note of which side she was standing on now. He felt warmed by it. "They're already talking about going down the hatch."

"What?" The word exploded from Jack's mouth, followed by a long stream of obscenity that proved what extensive time in Sawyer's company could do for someone's vocabulary. Kate watched him with the impassive look that she could get sometimes, the one that invited stranger or friend alike to read any emotion that they wanted onto her face with about an equal chance of being right. "Why?"

"The Others are probably the reason that our group didn't come back," Kate said evenly. She was till wearing that shuttered look. "The Others are probably the ones who made that hatch. You have to admit, Jack, it doesn't make a complete lack of sense."

"Yeah, but…" Jack ran his hand over the top of his head, wishing for once that his hair was long enough for him to tug at it in frustration. "Kate, we blew that thing open with dynamite." They both ignored Sawyer as he snorted in either awe or disbelief. "Half the island had to have heard it. Even if the Others do control that hatch, at this point they know that we know about it." Jack had never been in the military or had any exposure to games of strategy before that moment, but as the words exited his mouth he knew that he was right. "None of us are warriors. Surprise, if we really are going to attack, is the only chance that we'll have."

The corner of Kate's mouth twitched up enough to make Jack think that she was trying to smile. "Why do you think I'm here?" she asked.

"Are people listening to him?" Jack asked in lieu of direct response. Kate's look was more than enough answer, and Jack blew out his breath angrily. The feeling of being in way over his head in a politician's shark tank was back, but Jack was slowly coming to realize that he didn't have a lot of options outside of trying to swim, anyway. "He's not even the leader yet!"

"Jack," Kate said. Gentle as her tone was on the surface, there was a line of steel glittering brightly and dangerously for anyone who happened to scratch the surface deeply enough to see it. Not for the first time, Jack wondered at the woman she must have been before arriving in their little paradise. He was glad to have her on his side now. "Neither are you, not officially. You want to keep them from going out, you have to convince them."

Jack froze for a moment, then nodded. "I'll be out in a minute." He put his hand on Kate's shoulder and squeezed in some mixture of thanks and apology. For what, even he could have completely said. Kate's fingers touched at Jack's wrist and fluttered away before he could do much more than register the contact. Her blush was coming back. Jack turned back to Sawyer and noted that he was still holding the bottle of aspirin in his hand. "No more than four, Sawyer, I'm serious. Your blood doesn't need to be any thinner." Sawyer made an exasperated face at him and sketched out a mock salute that Jack was surprised to see did not include his middle finger, but he didn't seem inclined to argue. Sawyer's face was still set and pale. Jack would have put it down to continuing effects from the blood that Sawyer had lost, had he not seen Sawyer looking so healthy only moments before.

The main cavern was in an uproar when Jack walked in with Kate by his side. Everyone was trying to speak at once, no one was even attempting to listen to what the other person might be trying to say in the first place, and the result was an indecipherable din. Jack hugged against the wall and ignored Kate's confused look, for a few seconds relishing the sensation of not being the one immediately sought out and pressed for answers. There was already someone filling that role in his absence. Jack could not contain his small thrill at seeing that the spell did not seem to work quite so well on a crowd as it did when he was going one on one.

"People, people," Locke was saying, holding up his hands for quiet. Gradually, the chaos began to die down. Jack folded his arms over his chest and leaned further back against the wall. "We've been attacked. We're all scared. But we do have a way to get our people back, or at the very least learn what happened and avenge them." There were more murmurs and outright shouts of agreement in response to that last part than Jack thought should have made any leader comfortable.

"At what cost, John?" he said, pushing himself away from the wall at last. Kate stayed in the place that he had vacated. She crossed her arms over her chest and watched him intently as he went, making Jack wonder again how many skills that she possessed that she had not shared with him yet.

Locke snapped his head in Jack's direction when he heard his voice. "Going down into that hatch when we have no weapons, no idea of what we'll be facing when we reach the bottom?" Jack asked. "It this about finding our people, or is this about your quest?"

Locke's lips turned up. The smile almost reached his eyes. "No expects a victory to be handed to us, Jack," he said. A stirring ran through the crowd; though they had all sure been thinking of war, Jack wasn't sure that any of them had worked up the courage yet to say it out loud. "But I don't see any other way to go about it. That hatch is the only solid lead that we have pointing to where the Others might be hiding."

"That's not exactly true." Jack turned when he heard the voice. Sawyer was leaning against the opening to the infirmary cave. He was still deathly pale, and now a fine sheen of sweat could be seen glittering on his forehead. Sawyer licked at his lips and nodded towards Jin, to whom Sun was translating at a furious rate. "Me and him, we might have a pretty good idea of another option worth trying."

End Part Twelve


	13. Chapter 13

Part Thirteen

Sawyer listened to the conversation going on between Jack and Kate as he would one taking place in a foreign language, one where he knew only one word out of every five and was desperate to catch up in any way that he could. Truth be told, the trials and tribulations of any castaways not located in the cave where Jack seemed determined to plant him like a damned tree were not of much concern to him right at the moment. Not yet, anyway, though he had the feeling that they would be again soon. One problem at a time, even if the two of them were going to collide together very soon.

Sawyer smoothed the leg of his jeans back down, exhaling the air in his lungs slowly to stop himself from doing…something, as half-formed memories that shouldn't be real, couldn't be real, broke free to swirl around the inside of his head again. Maybe yelling. Maybe calling that bitch out on the carpet and telling her where she could shove her job offer-her demand.

Sawyer glanced up and realized that Kate was giving him one of her doe-eyed worried looks. It wasn't a concern of theirs, not until he got the chance to sit still for a spell and figure out what was going on. He wasn't just dreaming any longer, wasn't just sweating off whatever the hell that Sun had fed him.

Wasn't dreaming, all right. Might be going crazy, though.

Sawyer ran his fingers absently over the denim, tuning out most of the urgent conversation still taking place between Kate and Jack a few feet away. He still held the bottle of aspirin clasped loosely in the other hand, but it sure seemed like he had finally found something strong enough to push pain into the farthest and most easily forgotten corner of his mind without medical help. There was a set of bruises in the shape of fingers wrapped around his ankle. Now, Sawyer would freely admit that he didn't remember a lot of that night and badly wanted to believe that he had hallucinated the parts that he did remember, but he was still pretty damned sure that Jin didn't pick him up out the waves like a fish by his ankle. That was a grip that you used when you were trying to pull someone down deeper into the water, not up and out of it.

And if Sawyer wasn't bouncing right out of his mind and something worthy of that Straub book _was_ happening to him, then what was that something that had tried to pull him deeper down into the water. Sawyer exhaled again and heard a high whistling noise that he scarcely recognized as having come from himself.

Jack and Kate had finished their little tete a tete and were heading for the door, Jack throwing some drivel back about the aspirin that Sawyer barely bothered to listen to. He threw off a mock salute to send Jack on his way so that he could pause and think in peace, focusing instead on Kate. She regarded him solemnly, her face blank now that there were other and more important storm clouds on the horizon and she had something else to focus on. 'You're good, Freckles,' Sawyer felt like saying. 'But you're not that good.' Her hurt was still telegraphed loud and clear through the tightness around her eyes. Sawyer hoped that his apology was equally legible in his face, not for what had happened between him and Jack, but for the way in which she had discovered it. Kate's face went back to a mask of professionalism the likes of which he had never seen on her before a bare second later, so that he could not be sure that his message was received.

Jack paused before exiting so that he could cast Sawyer a look of his own, delivered in a sideways glance and over so quickly that Sawyer would have no trouble believing that Jack himself was even unaware of it. The look was filled with such a complicated stew of emotions that Sawyer did not even know where to begin if he wanted to untangle them all, except that in any other situation it would have been enough to turn his stomach to lead and send his feet carrying him straight out the door. He didn't like it when things were complicated, not when there was any hope in hell of avoiding it. The glance that Jack cast towards him, brief though it was, promised nothing _but_ complication. Sawyer should have known that Jack would not be the sort of person to just let it be whatever it was. Had to go and make it into some kind of country-Western song.

Sawyer could feel a scowl breaking out across his face. And he had to pick an island to have his next fling on, too, the one place where he had nowhere to run to once the itch had been scratched.

If that itch had in fact been scratched. Sawyer's scowl deepened as he began to struggle with the aspirin's cap. Major surgery, and all he got was fucking headache medication. Mark that down as one of the doctor's flaws, as Sawyer did not have the time to pause and review all of the others. He had gotten better medication that this when he had had his wisdom teeth pulled.

Sawyer got the bottle open at last amidst much wincing and muttering of oaths and shook out a handful of the pills into his palm. He felt as if he could swallow the entire bottle without doing more than making a dent in his pain. Jack could take his warnings and do whatever he wanted with them (even now, Sawyer was willing to admit that he had a few suggestions). Sawyer had walked through hangovers in which he had taken more aspirin than Jack was wanted to allow him and suffered no ill effects.

And he had not been bleeding from a dual set of bullet wounds then, either. Sawyer paused, rolled his eyes towards the ceiling, and pushed out a long-suffering sigh before he shook all but the allowed four pills aback into their bottle. Oh, but he was in deep. "You and me, Jack," Sawyer said, popping the pills into his mouth and reaching for the water bottle. Once he had taken a swig, he finished in a voice loud enough only to be heard by himself, "Seems we got a few things that still need to be hashed out."

When the last bitter aftertaste of the aspirin had been washed down his throat, Sawyer returned to a moody study of his ankle, where the bruises were hidden beneath the denim. And if Jack didn't mind going to bed with a crazy man, well, then they would be all set, wouldn't they? Sawyer could hardly believe that he was the first one on the island to start cracking up; with enough time, they ought to all be sitting out on the beach, staring out at the sea and rocking themselves. The French chick would probably make for great company once they were all more inclined to share her frame of mind.

Almost as if he was being guided by some force originating from outside of himself, Sawyer found himself reaching out to pull the denim up on his ankle again. He didn't feel crazy, but he supposed that the true straitjacket cases never did. And thinking that you were crazy didn't rule the possibility out, either, or otherwise there would not be so many people who checked themselves into mental hospitals without having to be bodily hauled in. An unseen hand glided up Sawyer's back, and he shivered. Sure, and he was already on an island with polar bears, sentient boar, and child-stealing monsters who seemed to stay only because they liked the view. Maybe they were all nuts, and the whole exercise was only their way of feeding each others' collective insanity.

A line drew itself between Sawyer's eyes as he stared down at the perfect finger marks that had been imprinted into his skin, too small to have come from Jin's hand even if he had somehow managed to get himself flipped upside and had to have been hauled up like a recalcitrant kitten. _Damn_ it, but Sawyer wished that he could remember anything real beyond the crack of the bullet striking his side and the second, similar sound his body had made when it hit the water. All he had were flashes, snapshots taken mostly out of focus, and he might as well have nothing all for all the good that they did in figuring out what had happened.

No. That wasn't entirely true. He remembered a sense of revulsion so great that even the recollection of it was staggering, though he could not say where it had come from.

Sawyer ignored the swift and angry scolding he received from his wrapped ribs and leaned forward, tracing his fingers across his ankle. The skin surrounding the bruises was warm and familiar, but the marks themselves felt as if they had been dipped in ice, a sensation that made his entire body then go freezing. Sawyer drew his lips back from his teeth at the pain, forced himself to touch the skin again. The cold snatched at his hand the way that the first few seconds of a winter wind could before one had a chance to brace themselves and prepare for it. Oh, if was going crazy then he was definitely going to do it in fine style.

'Not crazy. Just a stubborn son of a bitch.'

Sawyer jumped and swore once, pressed his hand to his side and swore again when the movement proved to be a costly one. The voice seemed to echo all about the cave and straight from the depths of his own skull between one moment and the next, simultaneously a shout and a whisper. Sawyer felt an urge to clap his hands over his ears even as he knew with the same certainty that told him there that there was a bright and blameless sun shining outside that it would do no good. This voice came from no human throat. As stripped of inflection and normal intonation as it was, Sawyer was forced to wonder if the throat it had once issued from had even been human. It was only be remembering the form that he had last seen it take that he was even able to convince himself that it was even female.

"Thought you were supposed to be my nighttime pathology," Sawyer gritted from between teeth clenched together so tightly that it was a wonder he was even able to produce sound. If he dug his fingernails any more deeply into the cave floor, he would be in danger of peeling them back entirely.

'It was crowded in there.' A thin line of blood ran from one of Sawyer's cuticles. 'And you weren't paying attention.

Sawyer gave vent to a hoarse laugh, taking care to keep it pitched low so that the people in attendance of the commotion outside would not be able to hear. He would like to keep his impending insanity a private matter for just a while longer, thank you so very much. "Well, Dream Date, did you ever pause to wonder if maybe that's because you're _not_ _real_?" His voice rose towards a dangerous volume and he had to pause, breathing heavily, until he was able to bring himself under control again. Sawyer realized the damage that he was on the verge of doing to his hands and forced himself to flex his fingers until the stiffness went out of them. The blood from his torn cuticle was already drying into a thin brown crust. Sawyer muttered to himself, "Tell you what, old hoss, this is a new one."

'Jack saw the bruises. You watched him look.'

"Then I put them there myself." Sawyer pressed his palms to his temples, only to drop them back into his lap when he realized how that must look. "Just like I'm talking to myself now. Lady, ain't you ever heard of psychotic memory lapses?"

'No. Neither have you.'

Sawyer made a huffing noise, even though by now he had to admit to himself that he was beginning to get really scared. When a complete mental meltdown was the least dangerous of all of your possible explanations, he figured that it might be time to admit that you were in over your head. "What, don't I get the whole heaven and earth speech, at least?" He waited, his head tilted to own side, for a few more neurons to misfire and send out another batch of their crazy-paste. When none came, Sawyer let loose with a shaky laugh that he had not known he still had and said, "Come on, now. Hamlet? Can't say you're a villain worth shaking over if you don't know your classics."

'I never read it.' For a moment the voice sounded almost unnerved, almost as if it were coming from a real human being. An unseen hand took an ice cube and ran it up and down Sawyer's spine. Of all of the tasty treats that his subconscious could come up with, he doubted that many of them were of a mind to show them the soft underbelly of the human condition. He exhaled through his nose.

'Get off your ass,' the voice repeated grimly, regaining some of its cool, my-isn't-this-distasteful distance, and was followed by a shriek that made the ice cube at the base of Sawyer's spine spread all through the rest of his body. He knew of only one candidate on the island within the right age bracket to make a sound like that. Unluckily for them, he couldn't say that he had a tremendous track record when it came to saving this one.

"Okay, Dream Date, you have my attention." Sawyer spread his hands out carefully over the tops of his knees so that he could not clench them into fists again. He was likely to pop the nails right off like the tabs on soda cans if the radical shift that his mood had taken over the last thirty seconds was any indication. "Now how about coming back and explaining to me one more time just what in the hell you are and how you mean for me to go about getting off my ass, all right? Your recruitment methods ain't exactly the most cordial that I've ever run across." An echoing silence greeted him, and Sawyer felt his entire body tense up even further. "Uh-uh-uh, sweetheart, I don't think so. You want my help, you're going to lay it all on the line and stop being a metaphysical cock tease here, so that we both know what we're dealing with."

Positioned so nonchalantly that he could almost believe that it had been an accident, Sawyer noticed that the Straub book had worked its way free from the pile of novels that Kate had brought for him. _Ghost Story._

Sawyer heard a snarling noise and did not believe until later that it had even been him and leapt up to his feet with a speed that he knew as soon as he was upright had been a mistake. The world swirled and tilted around the edges; Sawyer did not care. The book was in his hand within one second and hitting the cave wall in the next, pages making a fluttering sound as if they were trying to fly away from his next burst of rage. Sure, a self-aware book, and why not, when he was already hearing voices in his head? When he was about two steps away from seeing if he couldn't find a My First Straitjacket kit amidst the last of the airplane rubble?

"I don't think so, you self-important bitch," Sawyer said, becoming aware that his voice had risen high enough to draw quite the crowd, if the ruckus outside had not been more interesting. "We're not going to play that game. You want me to trot along like a good little puppy, I want to know who's actually holding the leash." Sawyer breathed out a laugh and felt his lips twisting into a savage grin. "We bring our own ghosts, hot stuff, and I'm afraid you just ain't much competition compared to what I already brought to this party."

Nothing but silence came back at him. Sawyer swore, bitterly and at length. He realized as he wound down that his ribs were slicked with wetness and for a moment he was afraid that had had pulled out another set of stitches in his haste to prove himself worthy of being the island's first mental patient. He didn't understand until a beat later that, icy feeling overtaking his body or not, he was still sweating like a man who had just run a marathon. The salt was stinging in his numerous small cuts, not to mention the bullet wound itself. Sawyer swore again and, as he found his eye coming to rest once more on the Straub book's cover. He had thrown it with enough force to send a long white crack running up the spine, so that it almost seemed to be smiling at him. All that darkness, surrounded by a single point of light. Sawyer thought that it looked like a beacon. Or possibly an eye, he could not be sure which. Sawyer kept a tight leash on his laughter, afraid that if he began again he might not be able to stop.

Jack had been right, loathe as Sawyer was to admit it even to himself. He was not ready to be on his feet again quite yet. Sawyer could picture all of the remaining blood in his body sloshing its noisy way down towards his kneecaps, oh so very far away from his brain where he really would have liked for it to stay for a spell. He put his hand out to steady himself against the wall as swirls of purple and yellow began to encroach upon the corners of his vision. He put his head down, focusing on getting one foot out ahead of the other and nothing else. Sawyer didn't need to see the path in order to know where he was going, not with the sounds of the crowd whipping itself into a panic to guide him, but oh how that journey getting there was not the most fun one that he had had in a while.

Locke was talking about that damned hatch that he had been so proud of over the last week or so when Sawyer entered the main cavern. Sawyer nearly snorted aloud. Give him something constant, anything constant, and he felt better already. "But I don't see any other way to go about it. That hatch is the only solid lead that we have pointing to where the Others might be hiding."

"That's not exactly true." Every head in the cave turned in his direction. Sawyer took in all of the their expressions and was tempted to tell them that, nope, he would wager each and every one of them a hundred bucks that he had just gotten the bigger shock to the system. He licked his lips instead, still tasting sea salt and the faint trace of Jack there, and tilted his chin in Jin's direction. Sun was speaking Korean to him at an amazing speed, but Jin's eyes were already locked with Sawyer's, as if he knew what Sawyer was going to say. "Me and him, we might have a pretty good idea of another lead worth trying."

End Part Thirteen


	14. Chapter 14

Part Fourteen

The cave erupted into pandemonium. Sawyer lifted his gaze away from Jin's face and onto Locke's, seeing an expression there that he would not realize had been recognition until much later. 'You're as much a part of this as I am, you old bastard,' Sawyer thought. He wasn't sure if he spoke it out loud; with the way that the caves held sound and then made it echo and everyone speaking at once, he couldn't make himself heard with anything less than a shout.

The purple and yellow swirls were coming back with a wicked vengeance, taking the world and making it tilt like a snow globe in the hands of a child. Half-digested boar rose into Sawyer's throat and his knees began to buckle. Jack appeared from nowhere and caught him before he could fall. He had to have begun moving the second that he heard Sawyer's voice in order to reach him that fast.

"Are you crazy?" Though Jack was speaking in a normal voice, the noise in the caves was loud enough that he had to press his lips tightly against Sawyer's ear in order to be heard. Sawyer made a faint sound from the back of his throat. One itch, not properly sated, that was coming back stronger than ever for having been indulged in the first place. He and Jack might have themselves a problem, here.

Sawyer leaned back so that he could look Jack in the face and saw that it was as pale as if Jack, rather than he, were the one who had just run into something that he probably wouldn't find in _Scientific American_. Two points of color glowed high up on Jack's cheeks, but his eyes were flat and dark. It was the angriest that Sawyer had ever seen him, a pretty big accomplishment when he remembered how good he was at pissing Jack off. For a few seconds Sawyer thought that Jack was furious with him for mentioning the monster's other lair. He then felt Jack's free hand running over his shoulder and side, checking for fresh blood, and realized that that had not been the case at all.

"Not a good question to be asking me right now, Doc," Sawyer answered finally.

Jack pulled back and studied Sawyer's face for a moment, as if he was looking for some definable stamp of madness that he could diagnose and treat as he would a broken bone. Finding none, Sawyer thought that Jack's expression grew even angrier. "You need to be lying down." Jack tugged at Sawyer's elbow as if he meant to bodily pull him back to his pallet, since Sawyer had clearly lost the good sense that would have taken him there on his own.

'Move your ass.' Yeah, but Sawyer didn't think that this was quite the direction that she had had in mind. He dug in his heels, a movement that was admittedly not as formidable as it could have been given that it was everything that he could do to stay on his feet, and brought them both to a halt.

"Not yet, Jack," Sawyer said. Jack threw him that stubborn, protective look that he got, the one that said the only thing that kept him from moving the world was the absence of a lever and a really good place to stand. Being seen as the one in need of protection rather than the one needing to be fought was so new that Sawyer staggered and nearly let himself be led away again. "Not until I've said my piece."

Sawyer pulled back and felt Jack's fingers tighten around his elbow in response. Even when they were at peace, they fought. "Don't go thinking that one good roll means you're going to start controlling me, Jack," Sawyer said, pitching his voice low to keep the conversation private. His intention was to shock or anger Jack into releasing him, but no dice. Apparently Jack was onto his game, for while he leaned back, he did not let go. Something flitted by in the corner of his vision, and Sawyer felt his lips turn up into a mirthless smile. "Besides, I need to move my ass."

"What?" The anger dissolved into confusion. Jack loosened his grip, only to tighten it again when Sawyer began to sway. "Sawyer, I'm not joking, you're not thinking straight. You don't need to be on your feet."

"Neither am I." When Jack raised his eyebrows, Sawyer clarified, "Joking. Jury's still out on the other one."

The flicker of blue happened again. Sawyer looked up. Boone was leaning against the stone wall only a few feet behind Locke, examining his mutilated finger again. He waved at Sawyer when he saw that he had been noticed.

"But maybe I could stand to sit for a spell," Sawyer allowed.

"The man sees reason," Jack said beneath his breath, just loudly enough to be sure that Sawyer would hear him. "Well, he's halfway there, anyway." He led Sawyer over to Sun and directed him to sit down with his back against the stone. "Do not let him get up."

"I love these little chance to make adult decisions, don't you?" Sawyer asked Sun, ignoring Jack's snort. Sun stared back at him with wide eyes, so Sawyer turned his attention back towards Jin. "Hi!" he said brightly. "It was fun sharing a secret with you while it lasted, but those days look like they're numbered." Jin tilted his head to one side and replied as Sun began translating, but Sawyer was no longer paying attention.

He looked back towards the place where Boone was still leaning against the wall behind Locke. How Boone had even gotten there on that leg of his Sawyer did not know, and he told himself that he was not going to worry about it, either. The point at which he began wondering about the locomotion practices of either ghosts or his brain's own crazy-paste, whatever it turned out to be, that would be the moment when he knew that he was too far gone to be pulled back from the brink.

It occurred to Sawyer that he had already pushed that particular boundary back several times already to convince himself that he was still sane. He tried to alleviate the situation by lifting his head and fixing Boone with the most poisonous glare that he could come up with. Absent the ability to make Boone corporeal long enough for Sawyer to throw rocks at him-not going to think about it, not going to think about it, not going to think about it-it was the best that Sawyer could do.

Boone realized that Sawyer was glaring at him and finally stopped playing with his broken finger long enough to look up. Thank God for that, because watching him do that was beginning to make Sawyer feel a little sick. "You took one, man," Boone said, holding his hand up to the light as if by trying hard enough he would be able to see through it. Sawyer was of half a mind to tell him that he would have more luck trying that with his own chest. "Now you owe one. I didn't make the rules."

Sawyer dipped his head. "Okay, Dream Date," he said in a fierce tone, ignoring the startled look that Sun gave him. "You already got my attention with the auditory hallucinations. Unless you're planning on putting in some work on prettying up your lap dog a touch, then I don't need the visuals, too." When he looked up again, Boone was gone. Locke, however, was staring right at him.

The crowd began to quiet by that point, until the proverbial needle could have been dropped if needles had not been in such short supply that they could not risk losing theirs. Sawyer thought for a moment that Locke had made some move to quiet them, though he could not see how, until he saw that Jack was standing in the center of the cavern without speaking and with his hands raised. Like water flowing downhill, people realized one by one that he was asking for their silence and cut the chatter. Jack had not needed to speak a word throughout the entire process, and he even looked a little surprised to see that it was working. Sawyer tilted himself back onto his elbows and thought that Jack shouldn't have been. He had a way about him, where if you placed him in one corner of a room for long enough, before long every eye in the place would be lingering on him.

"All right," Jack said when he had everyone's attention. He lowered his hands back to his sides. There were still two points of color blazing in an otherwise entirely pale face, and the glance that he flicked Sawyer's way was not pleased. Sawyer lifted his chin and did not look away. "It looks like an alternative may have been handed to us." He nodded towards Sawyer and said, his tone clapped, "You were saying, Sawyer?"

Sawyer raised his eyebrows. Jack's look was all but daring Sawyer to kick up a fuss. Well, Sawyer had never been one to avoid the occasional bout of contrariness, and he still had the power of that shriek echoing through his ears. 'Okay, Dream Date,' he thought to the bitch with the blank china-doll face, wherever she might be lurking. He was of no doubt that she was listening, since she didn't seem like the kind of lady to waste a lot of her energy worrying about whether or not she was crossing any kind of personal boundaries. 'You got me on board, for now. Better make it good.'

Sawyer leaned back further onto his elbows and eschewed all of his normal instincts towards making it good, making it a _story_. He explained what he and Jin had seen in the woods on the way back in simple, economical language, even aborting his normal expressive hand gestures as his shoulder began to tell him that enough was enough. Sawyer had barely gotten more than a few lines into the story that he realized that it was all for the better, as he had the crowd's rapt attention without any effort at all. To use his normal embellishments would have only cheapened the tale.

Except for one collective gasp when the nature of the creature that had kept all of them running scared since the first day, no one in the caves made a sound. Sawyer discovered that he was barely speaking above a whisper by the time that he wound down, because there was no need to speak any louder. He reached for a bottle of water and drank deeply before he lifted his eyes to scan the sea of faces staring back at him. All of them, he was glad to see, were those that still had pulses attached to them.

Jack cleared his throat and then winced slightly, as even that small sound came across as a blasphemy in the silence. "Can he verify this?" he asked Sun, indicating Jin as he stood by her side. Sun had been translating to Jin in a low tone all the while that Sawyer had been speaking, her voice a low, musical background note like the running of distant water. Jin tilted his head down to listen as Sun translated this final part, then nodded. Jack did not look nearly as happy as Sawyer expected him to be after receiving such a victory.

"Guess we don't need to go down the hatch after all," Jack said. He inclined his head in Sawyer's direction. "After that explosion, the whole island has to know that something is wrong there. They won't be expecting us at this other entrance."

Locke nodded, but his eyes were all for Sawyer. "Did you tell anyone about this before now?" he asked.

Sawyer shook his head. "Not a word." He didn't so much as glance in Jack's direction, though he knew that Jack was looking back at him. That was just fine. Let Jack be the noble one, so long as Sawyer could be the one who still knew how to work a room. It didn't take a con artist, even one who could probably add 'ex' to their title, to read the tension that was filling up the room now. He glanced towards Jin, who mostly had his head inclined towards Sun as she finished up her translating, but every now and again would look up to meet Sawyer's eyes. "I haven't really been in a position to pause for a leisurely chat with anyone. Seems like I have a lot to get caught up on."

Sawyer looked back towards Jack as he finished, half afraid that Jack was going to blurt out something exposing his knowledge of the monster and its lair, knowledge that he apparently had not seen fit to share with the rest of the rank and file. Sawyer realized a second later that he needn't have worried. Jack's eyes were dark and blazing, and Sawyer had no doubt that Jack did have a few things he would have liked to say right at that moment. It was pretty much their way. Even Jack had picked up on how little it would take to cause an explosion, though, tense as everyone was. He kept his silence.

Sawyer wondered for a second when it had become like this, this endless cross-hatching of alliances and enemies. It took him only a second to realize that it had been like this since the beginning, and they were only now having round table discussions rather than just smacking each other. That made it civilized.

He kind of wished that they would go back to smacking each other, actually. Civility, hell, but it was honest.

"I realize that we haven't gotten around to having that vote yet," Jack said. Sawyer tilted his head to one side. _What?_ "But if you'll put up with the informal system for a little bit longer, then we can organize a party to get our people back. _All_ of our people back," Jack added, and winced as if he was realizing how long a list that was becoming. Even while addressing the entire crowd at once, Jack scarcely had to raise his voice above its normal pitch at all. The caves took his words and hurled them back and forth as if even the rock was considering what he had to say, and not a single voice rose in protest while he was still saying it. Even Locke was silent and Sphinx-like. Sawyer stared down at his fingers were they lay interlocked in his lap and contemplated his next move.

"What makes you think that this try will go any better than the last one, Jack?" Kate asked. Her eyes were clear and dark, and Sawyer couldn't hear any challenge in her voice. As she always did when she was being faced with a situation that she didn't know quite how to deal with, Kate had retreated back into inscrutability. The best actor in the world would not have been able to read what was going on in her head. She did not meet Jack's eyes as she spoke, or Sawyer's when he looked her way. "If we just track the way that Sayid's group went…" Kate trailed off and lifted her shoulders into a shrug. "Definition of insanity."

"By going straight to the source: we're going to the other opening that we know of." Jack looked up as a ripple ran through the crowd even though not a single one of them said a word. "It's time to start changing the way that we do things, figure out what works and what doesn't."

"Throw out the sick," Locke said. Jack's shoulders hunched defensively, a reaction Sawyer didn't think that Jack could control any longer even if Locke had suggested that they give out free puppies instead, but Locke's tone was approving. "That's not the way that a doctor thinks, Jack." Locke paused for a moment before he nodded to himself and continued in a voice that if anything sounded even more pleased than before, "But it is the way that a leader thinks."

"I'm so glad that you approve," Jack said dryly. He clapped his hands together, making several of the more flighty members of his audience jump. The fear and the need to do something, do anything, was so thick that it was almost making the air waver like a physical thing. "We'll take a group of…six?" He glanced towards Locke as he said it, including him in the decision as a matter of course, and they both looked surprised when they realized what he was doing.

"Anything larger than that won't be able to move quickly," Locke allowed, his eyebrows drawing together as he retreated into an internal world. "Kate and I can track sign." Kate shrugged and made a nonchalant gesture, accepting her inclusion on the mission without fuss. There were still lines of tension set into the flesh around her mouth and tightening the muscles of her shoulders. She would only look towards Sawyer or Jack in quick, flickering glances. He imagined that there were a sight many less awkward ways that that triangle of theirs could have worked itself out, and he wished that he had some way of pulling her to the side and trying in some form or fashion to make things right with her.

Sawyer unlaced his fingers, placed them on his thighs, and drummed out an impatient pattern. 'Move your ass.' Well, he was trying, wasn't he?

"I'm guessing that you'll be coming along, too," Locke said, coming out of whatever place he had retreated into so that he could raise his eyebrows at Jack.

The corner of Jack's mouth quirked upwards. Sawyer had to give them both credit for being fine actors. Were he not able to claim that title himself, he would say that there was a hatchet being buried here, rather than merely hidden behind a pair of backs until it was expedient to bring it out again. "Uh-huh," Jack said. "Do you think that's a doctor's decision, or a leader's?"

"Little of both," Locke said. He folded his arms over his chest. "That makes three."

"Four," Charlie said. The blood had drained away from his face, leaving the scabbed-over burn standing out starkly. His eyes were calm. "I want to help." Jack and Locke both hesitated, and Charlie set his jaw as he realized this.

"We could use the extra hands," Jack said at last, and even Charlie blinked as if that was not the outcome that he had expected. "Okay, four. We'll need Jin to take us to the opening and Sun to translate. That rounds out the six."

"Then I hope that you really meant you were taking seven," Michael said from the edge of the crowd, where he had been watching the goings-on without commentary. He stood with his legs braced far apart, arms folded over his chest, in a posture that imitated Locke's to a degree that was almost eerie. Unlike Locke, however, only Michael's posture was serene. His eyes burned with a dark, powerful fire that made Sawyer frankly glad that he was not the one that had taken Walt. He seen men like Michael before, had given their wives a toss or two, and had usually gotten out of town with a storm on his heels. Men in that kind of mood weren't content to get the thing that they had lost back: they wanted to go after the thief and make sure through one creative measure or another that his stealing days were done.

Sawyer cut his eyes in Jack's direction, wondering if Jack was noticing all of this and afraid that Jack would see only the trails of salt that still glittered if Michael turned his head just right, the cracks in his lips where it looked like he had been chewing at them. Jack hesitated long enough to let Sawyer know that he had underestimated him before he said carefully, "Seven won't travel any more slowly than six. Michael, do you think that you'll be able to keep your…"

Here Jack trailed off, as if he knew what he needed to say but was afraid of how it would sound once it was riding the open air. Not for the first time, Sawyer wondered what Jack had been like when he had to deliver news of a failed operation to waiting family members back in the real world, if Jack had been stamped all over the with the same kind of painful sincerity then. Somehow, Sawyer figured that he probably was.

"My temper?" Michael finished for Jack. His smile was glittering and knife-like. "Man, don't worry about my temper. I'll be just fine until we get there."

"And then?" Locke asked.

That smile positively gleamed. Sawyer wished that Michael would put it away. "That part's not in my hands," Michael said. For once, Jack and Locke shared an expression, that of pure worry.

Sawyer forced himself to stop drumming his fingers against his legs and looked up. "Thin you boys are missing out on something," he said. The crowd was drifting away in small bunches as the core group drew even closer together, and they no longer had to raise their voices in order to be heard. Sawyer flicked a few strands of hair back from his face and looked at them all. For once, he wasn't getting quite the thrill that he was used to out of having an audience. "Numbers ain't your big problem here, are they?" The corner of Sawyer's mouth quirked up. "I mean, any way that you slice it, what you're talking about doing here is redefining 'long shot' so much that most bookies would laugh their asses off if you tried to make a bet on it."

Jack sighed. If the dark shadows beneath his eyes and the gray hollows marking his cheeks were any indicator, one good night of post-coital rest was just a drop in the bucket of what he needed. Sawyer dragged a hand first over his eyes, then through his hair, and told himself that if he was going to have to resign himself to giving a damn about such things now then surely he could wait to do until his own situation was not so infinitely worse.

"Sawyer," Jack said, "you can rest easy knowing that you've contributed to chaos, all right?" Sawyer narrowed his eyes and tilted himself further back onto his elbows. He could already feel a belligerent expression moving across his face. "Now please be quiet so if that's all that you were planning on bringing to the table."

If Sawyer narrowed his eyes any further, he was not going to be able to see. Their first lover's spat. Golly, and wasn't it just the cutest thing, too. Sawyer knew now why he didn't make a practice of sticking around long enough for it to get this far. "Votes haven't been cast yet, Captain America," he snarled, putting a special, malicious stress into the nickname. Jack's eyes darkened and twin points of color began to rise in his cheeks. "'Til that bit becomes official, the way I see it, this is still a round table discussion." Sawyer spread his hands as much as he was able without upsetting his shoulder. He winced as it issued a warning, anyway. Something moved in Jack's face. "Don't want to go pissing off all of your constituents before the election day." 'Don't clench you teeth so hard, Jackie-boy. You're about to break them off.'

"Fine," Jack said. "Say your piece and make it good."

Sawyer had to give Jack credit. He was almost able to make Sawyer believe that he didn't give a damn. "Jin and I are the only two that can get you to that second opening," Sawyer said at last, speaking in a clipped, efficient tone that scarcely sounded like him. "But, whoops, Jin here don't understand English. You want to take him along, you have to take the missus, too." Jack made a hurry-up gesture with his hand and Sawyer split his lips into a smile that sounded more like a baring of teeth. "I'm getting there. It's a big picture issue, takes a little time to warm up to. Somehow, with you determined to go on this mission at the same time, I'm not thinking that this is a great plan." Jack's eyes darkened further, so Sawyer went on before he could be cut off. "You ask me? Of me and Jin, which one is less likely to get a whole bunch of other people hurt?"

"No," Jack said. His voice was flat and eerie, similar enough to Dream Date's to put a chill up Sawyer's spine. "You're not going." Kate took a small step closer to Jack, adding her agreement without saying a word. When her eyes met Sawyer's at last, the corner of her mouth lifted in a small smile.

Oh, no, they weren't going to gang up on him like that. Sawyer set his jaw and pushed himself back up to his feet. The world obliged him by only tilting around the edges a little bit. "It makes sense, Jack," he said. "At least one person with medical experience needs to stay behind, so it's you or Sun."

Jack blinked whenever Sawyer used his actual name, as if he had to pause and rewind to make sure that he had heard correctly, but the tension did not go out of his jaw. "Know what really makes sense? One of you has a sunburn. The other one has _two bullet_ _holes_!" His voice rose enough on the final three words to lift the eyebrows of everyone within their circle and turn the heads of those who were still lingering nearby and pretending not to listen.

Sawyer smiled at Jack and Kate in turn. "I'm going," he said. "I can go with you as part of the group or I can trail along after you, but unless you plan on tying me down I ain't staying behind." Sawyer shrugged his shoulders without thinking and then poured every ounce of energy that he had into preventing the ensuing sunburst occurring behind his eyes from showing across his face. Somehow he didn't think that was going to help his case. "All cards on the table."

"You ever notice that you've been kind of accident-prone since you landed on this island, Sawyer?" Jack asked. He had lowered his voice, though he could still be heard clearly by everyone within their semicircle, and Sawyer got the feeling that he was listening to a message meant for him and him alone. There was a note of something there that was almost pleading. Sawyer wished for a moment that he could pause and listen to it some more.

He sucked in his breath. Right, and these were not the kinds of thoughts that he needed to be entertaining right now.

"You ever notice how few of those were actually accidents, _Jack_?" Sawyer snapped back, and took no pleasure at the way that Jack's entire face seemed to tighten.

"Keep up," Jack snarled at long last, "and don't do anything else to yourself. Your insurance is about to run out." He turned to go. Sawyer stared at his retreating back.

"Moving my ass," he muttered beneath his breath as everyone around him dispersed to collect their gear. "Right. Ball's in your court, Dream Date, and you'd better have something good up that cold, dead sleeve of yours." Sawyer's adam's apple worked up and down as he swallowed.

"I'm getting pissed."

End Part Fourteen


	15. Chapter 15

Part Fifteen

Plastic or not, if Jack threw those water bottles into his pack much harder he was going to break them. The resources that had come along on the plane were scarce enough as it was. He finished filling one and screwed the cap back on, pausing and forcing himself to take several deep breaths until he could put it back calmly. For the moment he was alone while everyone else busied themselves with getting their own gear together.

Jack rubbed his eyes to ward off the tension headache that was trying to throw down roots under his skull and looked up at the place where Sawyer was putting together his supplies, or at the very least was hovering over the backpack that would hold them. He had buttoned up his shirt so that the worst of his injuries were hidden from view, but even from a distance Jack could see that if he were to magic the sunburn away Sawyer's face would be the color of milk. Sawyer passed his hand over his eyes every few seconds in a gesture eerily similar to the one that Jack had just made, and his eyes were only opening at half-mast. Kate appeared to be doing most of his packing for him. She caught Jack's eye and lifted her eyebrows slightly, jerking her head in Sawyer's direction. 'Do something about this!'

Jack lifted his shoulders and pulled another empty bottle from his pack so that he could fill it. 'What do you expect me to do?'

Kate got a determined look on her face and, bending her head quickly to speak to Sawyer, picked up two empty water bottles. She marched over to where Jack was kneeling. "You need to put a stop to this!" Kate hissed to Jack from the corner of her mouth as she uncapped one of the bottles and thrust it beneath the flow of the water. Her knuckles were wrapped very tightly around the neck of the bottle. Jack wondered if she was imagining her fingers doing the same job around the neck of someone else, and the corner of his mouth quirked up. Sometimes, he and Kate were on the same wavelength so much that it was scary.

"Who do you expect me to do?" Jack hissed back. He forced his fingers to uncurl one by one from the neck of the bottle, realizing that he was picturing Sawyer's neck there himself. "There's not a lot that I can do about it, unless you want me to tie him up and stick him in a dark cave somewhere." Jack cleared his throat and realized that his voice had cracked a bit on that last part. He was picking a terrific time to flashback to the age of eighteen. First chance that Jack got, he was going to find a way to send his libido a thank-you note.

Kate stared at him for a long moment before she realized that the first water bottle had begun to run over some seconds before and hurriedly pulled it from the water. "Do not," she said, capping the bottle and thrusting the second one into the water. Jack now thought that it was his neck that she was seeing clenched between her fingers. "Do _not_ tell me what you were thinking just then."

"Agreed," Jack said quickly. He looked up again to see that Kate was crinkling her eyes at him, working her lower lip between her teeth in an attempt not to smile. Jack had always loved those hints of a perverse sense of humor that she could let slip through whenever she wiggled out from beneath the weight of those secrets that she had not yet shared with him, and for a moment it was almost, almost like it had been before. "Haven't you tried to talk him out of it?" Kate fixed him with a look until Jack lifted his shoulders. "Well, if you can't get through to him, what makes you think that I'll be able to?"

Kate finished filling the second bottle and took an inordinate amount of time to twist the cap back on, lowering her head so that she would not have to look Jack in the face. "The two of seemed to have a bond," she said in a low voice.

"Kate," Jack said, and then paused as all of the things that ran through his head seemed empty and cheap. "It's really not like that. It was just a one night stand."

"We're on an island, Jack," Kate said. She gathered the bottles to her chest and stood up. "We don't get one night stands. Nowhere to run." She balanced her burden in the crook of her elbow so that she wouldn't drop it and pushed back a few strands of hair that had come free from her ponytail. "And I'm good at reading people."

"I'm sorry that it turned out this way," Jack said. "That I hurt you," he added, feeling that the first part needed to be clarified.

"Me, too." Kate tried to smile, and it looked mostly real. She bent back down so that she could kiss Jack's cheek. As Kate's lips brushed against the stubble, the female scent of her was for one moment staggering. "But I have a way of wrecking good men, so maybe it's for the best." One of the bottles slipped from her grasp, so that Jack had to reach out quickly to catch it before it could dash against the rocks and possibly break. He turned the action of handing it back to her into an opportunity to squeeze at her hand.

"Thanks," Kate said as she tucked the bottle back against her chest.

"No," Jack replied. "Thank you." Kate graced him with one final smile as she turned to walk away. Jack lifted his eyes and noticed that Sawyer was watching them both; how long he had been doing it Jack could not say. He raised his chin and pinned Sawyer with a challenging look. Sawyer twitched and returned one of his one before Kate reached him. She flicked a few strands of hair back form his face as she spoke to him, managing to make it look almost like an accident when she thunked him in the forehead, and he grabbed at her hand before she could pull it out of his reach. The dimples were working hard enough to earn their way into a union.

The plastic beneath his fingers made a cracking sound in warning. Jack took a deep breath and forced his knuckles to relax before he did injury to them. Would he be this irritated if it was a normal patient insisting on doing something so ill-advised and stupid? Jack took another sideways glance at Sawyer from beneath his lashes. Sawyer was on his feet by then, though he was listing visibly from side to side. Kate had braced her hand against his shoulder to keep him steady as she raised herself onto her toes so that she would be able to speak into his ear. Jack hoped that she was questioning his sanity in the same way that Jack had earlier, preferably with more swearing this time, as that seemed to be a language that Sawyer understood. Sawyer shook his head in response to whatever Kate had said, causing a disgusted look to appear on her face.

Yep, Jack decided in response to his own question. He would be just as annoyed if he and Sawyer had not slept together and shoved themselves into some strange limbo place where the ground kept sliding beneath their feet, if Sawyer had pulled a stunt like this on the first day that they had known each other, and even if had not been Sawyer at all. If it had been Joe Random doing something like this back in the real world, though, Jack would not have had to waste the energy in arguing with him at all, but doped him up to the point where there was no way that he was going to consider going anywhere before Jack himself leaped forward to deal with the next big crisis, the next miracle demanding his attention.

He forgot the order that he had issued to himself about going easy on the bottles and threw the last one into the pack, where it made a clacking sound against all of the others. Jack zipped the pack up and threw it over one shoulder, his movements short and abrupt with anger that he was only barely keeping under control. He thought that he could feel Sawyer's eyes against the back of his neck as he stalked off towards the infirmary cave, but he knew that in the time it took for him to turn around Sawyer would be occupied with something else again.

A little of the afternoon sunlight was able to drift into the infirmary cave from its side entrance, cutting the gloom enough so that Jack could see what he was doing. He crouched beside his medical bag, muttering a string of obscenities and threats beneath his breath as he sorted through what he planned on taking with him. Most of the words centered around Sawyer, while Locke claimed his fair share and one or two were even directed towards the universe at large. In spite of himself, Jack felt the corner of his mouth quirking up as he caught the last one. Pretty funny to be swearing at fate, for all that he claimed not to believe in it.

Jack sighed as he pitched Sawyer's antibiotics in after the sewing kit and looked around at everything else that he was going to have to leave behind. Even stripped down to the very basics, that still excluded a lot. Jack's imagination was already constructing nightmare scenarios in which someone-most notably a very specific someone-died because he lacked the tools to save his life.

"Focus on what you can control," Jack whispered to himself. It was as good a mantra as any. He zipped the pack up again and, looking back in the direction of the main cavern, decided that there was still one more thing that they needed before they could set out. Jack dipped his head and stepped quickly out of the cave and into the jungle.

It was immediately several degrees cooler once he was beyond the insulating walls of stone and the heat of bodies, causing Jack to lift up his face so that he could taste the breeze. There was sea salt there, overlaid with the earthy and alive smell of approaching rain. Arzt had been right.

Jack's father had taught him how to scent an oncoming storm close to thirty years before. Jack could not remember the exact details of that night, except that they had stood on the front porch and it had to have been during the slim window of time when Christian had had enough to drink in order to take this meanness away but not enough to bring it back again. It was not until much later that Jack had realized that most boys had moments like this with their fathers all the time, that there was perhaps something wrong in prizing the memory for its rarity.

Jack felt a scowl traveling to take over his face. And now he was letting it distract him from his job. He paused a moment longer to enjoy the wind and the dual promise of wildness and life that he could smell riding on the storm along with it before he went on.

The breeze was much stronger in the canopy than the pleasant movement of air than Jack was receiving on the ground floor, and he had gone only a short distance before he found exactly what he was looking for. A tree branch lay across the jungle floor at Jack's feet, broken so recently that golden sap still gleamed at the jagged end. Jack lifted it up, finding that it stood at roughly the same height as his shoulder, and tested his weight on it. Even with his full strength resting on it, the branch did not so much as creak. That would do just fine. Jack pulled the battered pocketknife that he kept for everyday tasks from his pack and quickly cut away the extra leaves and twigs. When he had the branch cleaned to his satisfaction, Jack put the knife away and carried his prize back to camp.

Everyone was ready and waiting only for him by the time that Jack returned. "Sorry," he said to them all, but most especially to Michael, who was looking more ragged about the edges by the second. "Unavoidable detour." He walked over to Sawyer and thrust the walking stick into his hand. "Here. So maybe you won't be dragging all the rest of us back so much."

Sawyer stared at the staff that Jack handed to him for a very long time, as if he wasn't quite sure what it as. He tested his weight on it, a faint smile tugging up the corners of his mouth when he discovered that it would hold him. Sawyer looked back up at Jack with a curious expression in his eyes. "And here I thought you said that my insurance had gone and run out." The smile took on a suggestion of a leer. "What am I going to have to do to pay off this debt?"

"Hippocratic oath." Jack's knuckles brushed against Sawyer's as he took his own sweet time in letting go of the staff. "If I didn't let you fall for being a reckless ass before, I'm not going to start now." Something wary, almost scared, moved across Sawyer's face and only intensified when Jack leaned in close. Had either of them wanted, they could have stolen a kiss.

"Why are you doing this, Sawyer?" Jack asked in a voice so low that he scarcely even heard himself. Sawyer opened his mouth, but Jack cut him off before he could speak. "No, and don't give me any bullshit about being the only one who can lead us to the other entrance. We could make something work with Jin." Jack paused for a moment before he said, "You really don't strike me as the martyr type."

Sawyer leaned back, a brief blaze entering his eyes that made Jack sure that he had said the wrong thing. "Well, I sure as hell ain't a hero, either, so what does that leave me?" He flashed Jack a grin that was gleaming and jagged around the edges. "I think reckless idiot fits me just fine, how about you?" Sawyer wasn't one to fire warning shots, but Jack still knew that this was exactly what he was being offered now.

If Sawyer wasn't one to fire them, then Jack also wasn't one to heed them. He leaned in closer and gestured towards Sawyer's arm, where a pink line of scar tissue was hidden beneath the sleeve of his shirt. "And you're sure that it's not about that?" Having ignored his one warning, he braced himself for Sawyer to fire a bullet right between his eyes.

Something flat moved into Sawyer's eyes that Jack had seen on only a few previous occasions, and on few still that had ended well. "No, Jack," he said. Where Sawyer was planning on putting the poison that was hovering so violently and obviously beneath the surface, Jack could not say, but the very sight of it made his stomach twist. "It's not about that.

A few seconds of silence went by in which they were once again drawing close to each other, as if pulled by magnets that they could neither see nor remove. "Easy there, hoss," Sawyer whispered. His breath was a warm fan over Jack's cheek. "You sidle up much closer to me and you're going to have to make good on some private promises in a very public place."

"I'm not the only one who moved, am I?" Jack untangled his fingers from Sawyer's and stepped back. He could feel Sawyer's eyes on him, and by now the eyes of everyone else as well. Private promises? It had sounded to Jack as if they had made some more then without even intending to.

---

Kate watched Jack and Sawyer whispering to each other and worked her lower lip between her teeth, aware by this point that she must look like a jealous teenager but at the same time unable to quite stop herself. She had grown so used to their triangle and its confines that she had not noticed as it became more and more equilateral, so that it was a shock when she found herself forced out entirely.

She took a deep breath and crossed her arms over her chest. Did she feel left out now? Yeah, she wouldn't lie about that, and once in the very recent past she would have declared her own private war in doing something about it. Maybe that was why she was so determined to stay her hand now. The temptation to slide back into the person that she had allowed her circumstances to turn her into was always present, always tugging at her.

Jack handed Sawyer the walking stick. Kate turned away before they could lean close again.

'You're a bigger person than this,' Kate told herself fiercely. 'And if not now, then by God you're going to be.'

A warm hand came down on her shoulder. Kate twitched, feeling her usual second of limbo between fight and flight, before she turned to meet Locke's kindly gaze. "Maybe this isn't going to be such an easy journey," Locke said in a gentle voice.

His tone and eyes were nearly fatherly, causing a prickle to run up Kate's spine. Smiling to show that there was no harm done, Kate picked Locke's hand off of her shoulder and stepped away. "I wasn't expecting it to be," she said. "I'm tough. I'll be all right."

"Do you still have the knife that I gave you?" Locke asked.

"Keeping it close like my own baby," Kate replied. She patted at a side pocket on her backpack, where the hilt could just be seen poking out.

"Good girl. You may very well need it." Locke stepped away to speak with Charlie. Kate back and saw that Jack was staring at her, his expression worried. Of course he was worried for her; that was the kind of man that Jack was. Kate felt another one of those swift pangs. Fine. So she wasn't that person yet.

Sawyer was still looking at his walking stick as if it was the best present that he had received in a good long time, not paying attention to any of the goodbyes going on around him. Kate shifted the straps of her pack on her shoulders and turned away towards the cave's entrance.

---

Tracy had taken Aaron away on the pretense of being homesick for her own children and needing something small to cuddle for a moment or two, but Claire suspected that it was really because Tracy wanted to give her a chance to say goodbye to Charlie. She could see Tracy glancing up every few seconds from the position that she had taken on an outcropping of stone several feet away. When she wasn't watching Claire from the corner of her eye, Tracy was keeping herself occupied with the solemn duty of blowing raspberries onto Aaron's belly. Aaron shrieked with mirth and waved his hands in the air.

"I want you to be careful," Claire said to Charlie. Their hands had become clasped in each other's over the course of their conversation, and every time that Claire would unhook her fingers from his they seemed to crawl back within seconds. "Promise me, Charlie."

He grinned at her. Claire thought that Charlie looked a touch too chipper for someone who was about to march off and face the dragon. She wondered if he realized this. "No worries, love," he said. "We'll be back so fast that you'll hardly even realize we were gone."

Claire made a face. "Charlie. Promise."

Again that grin, until Claire had no choice but to smile herself. "I promise that I'll come back," Charlie said in the voice of a schoolboy reciting a lesson that he had memorized a long time ago and was amused by having to bring it up again. "That's got to be one better than just promising to be careful, yeah?"

Claire tried to pull another face and ruined it by smiling. "But I'll hold you to that one, too."

Charlie kissed her before he answered, swift and playful, grinned when he saw her face, and kissed her again. "I never break a promise," he said, a touch of the levity going out of his voice. Claire wasn't sure what it was that came to replace it, except that she had never heard it before. Claire found her gaze being drawn up to the half-healed mark on Charlie's forehead as he squeezed her hand one final time and walked over to greet Locke, who had begun to walk towards them. Locke raised his hand and touched Charlie's forehead for a moment, which did little to soothe away Claire's uneasiness.

Michael was standing by himself as he waited for the others to finish their goodbyes and join him. Seeing him alone pulled at something in Claire's chest, so she signaled to Tracy that she was going to be just a few moments longer. "Hey, Michael," she said, pushing a few strands that had fallen loose from her ponytail back behind her ears. "We've never really gotten a chance to talk, have we?"

"Not really," Michael said, looking down at her. "Are you here to tell me that you know what I'm going through?" His face was tight and drawn, but there was no anger in his voice.

"More or less." Claire felt suddenly very young and very awkward. She put her hair behind her ears again. "I mean, I know that Aaron was only gone for a few hours, but still…" Claire trailed off as everything that she had planned on saying shriveled in her mouth. "I'm sorry," she finished.

The corner of Michael's mouth twitched up. Claire thought that it would have been a smile if the rest of Michael's face had not looked so worn-down and terrible. "I know that you are." He shifted his shoulders and seemed to be drawing up his interior reserves through an exercise of pure will. "Won't have to be sorry for much longer, though. I'm not coming back without my boy." He turned his head as Sun and Jin came up to say their farewells, leaving Claire with a graceful way to make her exit. She watched from a distance as Sun first hugged Michael and then stepped to the side so that Jin could clasp his hand. That also turned into a hug within seconds, first with one arm and then with both, until Claire began to feel as if she was intruding into a private moment among the three of them. She reclaimed her baby from Tracy and settled next to her against the wall to watch the rest of events unfold.

But she could not stop her eyes from returning to Charlie's forehead again and again and again.

---

Locke was in the rare position of not knowing what was going to happen next or he was going to be fully in control of the situation when it did, and he did not like it in the slightest. It smacked far too much of the way that things had been before.

The lady passed close behind him, continuously moving as she always was, having eyes only for Sawyer. She trembled, and Locke did not know why. "He's not mine," she said. Locke could not answer her, but after she spoke he knew that her trembling was a combination of wariness and fear. "She shouldn't be able to do that."

Strictly speaking, the lady herself should not be able to do that, though Locke did not think that this was something that she would appreciate hearing. Not for the first time, he wondered if she really was the source, or if she was just one more person borrowing the dragon.

"I'm going on this to bring that boy back, not to hurt him," Locke murmured, raising his voice to a level audible to his ears alone. The lady, who wasn't dealing with human limitations, heard him all the same. That was enough.

She lifted her eyes, brilliant and green, away from Sawyer long enough to stare at him. Locke thought that he could catch a whiff of her scent, like moss, like living and growing things. "I don't expect you to," she said, before she turned and drifted away. Locke knew that she would be gone before he even turned his head.

Boone had also disappeared, or else Locke might have found a way to ask him if he knew anything else about what was going on, if he knew what this strange new presence that he could feel tingling at the back of his neck in unguarded moments was, if he knew what Sawyer was up to and why Locke had the terrible feeling that he had also been chosen, and not by the island.

But Boone was long gone, of course, and he had little patience for talking to Locke these days. Locke supposed that he could understand why.

He tapped at the burn on Charlie's forehead as the young man drew close, keeping his touch light so that he would not cause him pain. There was going to be a scar. "Given yourself quite a mark there, Charlie," he said.

"Yeah." Charlie blushed and raised his own hand to touch at the scabbed-over burn. "I hear that women like scars, though. It could work out."

"You got lucky," Locke said. "It could have been a lot worse. You could even say that something chose you, in a way."

Charlie dropped his hand to his side, flicking Locke a look that was both incredulous and amused. "Sure, man. Whatever you say." His mouth twisted into a half-smile as he caught himself reaching up to finger the wound again only a few seconds later.

Locke allowed his gaze to drift across the cave to where Jack and Hurley were conducting an intense, hushed conversation. Even when they made pacts to get everything out in the open, they found ways to draw secrets close around themselves again. Jack looked up suddenly, meeting Locke's gaze as if he could read his thoughts. There was no love lost in that stare.

He didn't understand, Locke though as he turned away. Jack thought that he wanted power, because Jack himself had had it thrust upon him so many times that he could not help but read the desire for it into everyone around him. He could not be more wrong. Locke wanted only what he had wanted since the first moment that he had landed on the island, to understand. Understand why he had been chosen, and why he was no longer the only one.

---

Hurley looked a little green as he stared down at the object that Jack was offering to him, and he made no move to take it. "I don't know, man," he said. "I've never even used one of those before."

"Until a few weeks ago, I had never used one, either. Look, it's not hard." Jack showed Hurley where the safety on the handgun was and how to remove and reload the clip. His hands were sure and quick, so much so that even Jack could hardly believe that this was only the third or fourth time that he had done it. He discharged the clip one final time and placed both items in Hurley's hand, wrapping his fingers around them when Hurley showed no inclination to grasp them on his own.

"We're taking two guns with us," Jack said. "That only leaves one to protect the caves."

Hurley was still very pale. Beads of sweat had begun to break out on his forehead. "I don't think you want to leave this gun with me, Jack," he said. "Just trust me on this, bad things have a way of happening around me without the aid of firearms."

Jack blinked at the strange statement, but for the sake of time decided that he would let it pass. He lifted his eyes, matched stares for a moment or two with Locke on the other side of the cave, and found that he was grinding his teeth when he looked back towards Hurley. "You're the only one that I trust not to use it unless it's necessary."

"Oh." If the look on Hurley's face was any indication, Jack might as well have pulled out a sword and knighted him. His fingers tightened beneath Jack's own, finally claiming the gun. He looked nauseous as he stared down at it. "I still don't think that this is going to end well, Jack."

"You'll be fine." Jack clapped Hurley once on the shoulder. Like iron filings to a magnet, as soon as Hurley had left Jack found that his eyes were seeking out Sawyer again. He found him in a darkened corner of the cave, talking to Sun as he leaned heavily on his new walking stick.

"Only enough to fill your palm, no more," Sun was saying. She paused and looked at Sawyer's hands. "In your case, perhaps only enough to fill half of your palm. Add it to a cup of boiling water and let it stand. You should feel the effects within fifteen minutes. Make sure that you have a safe place to lie down before you drink it." Sun handed him one of the camp's plastic bags, almost as precious as gold for how rare they were becoming. Jack could see that she had filled it with the leaves that she had been clenching in her fists when he had been treating Sawyer and Jin on the beach.

"Yeah, thanks," Sawyer muttered, looking none too pleased as he accepted the bag. Wincing, he began leaning over to pick up his pack.

Jack got there first. "Thought that stuff gave you nightmares," he said, picking up the pack for Sawyer.

Sawyer made a face as he threw the bag inside. "It does." Off of Jack's look, he sighed. "Don't ask, okay? I don't quite know myself."

"Secret masochist. Got it." Jack zipped the backpack back up. He couldn't help but notice as he did so that Sawyer had stolen the bottle of aspirin back from him. Pretty interesting move for a man who seemed to be favoring a more homeopathic method of pain management. "That doesn't come as much of a surprise, really."

"You're hysterical, Doc. If there were enough people on this island for a comedy circuit I would put you on it." Sawyer gestured for Jack to give the pack back to him.

Jack held onto it. "Is this related in any way to you going with us?" Sawyer stiffened, giving Jack all the answer that he needed. "Sawyer, if there's something going on…"

Sawyer gave him one of those acid-bright and knife-vicious smiles that he was capable of, the ones that let Jack know that he had crossed some kind of invisible line and would be getting exactly nowhere for his trouble. "You going to give me that back or not?" Sawyer asked.

Jack hefted Sawyer's pack with one hand to test the weight. "No," he said, slinging it over his shoulder in spite of the fact that he was already carrying his own. "You're going to have enough trouble keeping up as it is."

Sawyer's eyes went dark. "I don't need your pity, Jack." There was a warning note in his voice, and a pleading one also. Jack felt himself leaning back, looking for that final piece that would make this man make sense and realizing that it was probably buried so deeply that even Sawyer himself did not know the location any longer.

"No, you need to not push yourself so hard that you wind up undoing all of the work I did in putting you back together again." Jack let a beat go by before he said, in a gentler voice. "You don't have to carry the weight by yourself all of the time."

Sawyer jerked back as if Jack had slapped him. Jack braced himself for the storm brewing at the back of Sawyer's eyes to come spilling forth out of his mouth. Sawyer surprised him by jerking his chin up in the very faintest of nods. "I can't go spilling any secrets that I don't rightly know, Jack," he said. "Take what you can get."

"For now," Jack allowed. He shifted Sawyer's pack into a more comfortable position on his shoulder as he and Sawyer made their way over to the rest of the group. The six of them disappeared from the caves and into the bright sunlight beyond.

End Part Fifteen


	16. Chapter 16

Part Sixteen

Sweat was sticking Sawyer's shirt to his body and rivulets of the same were running into his eyes, making his vision double and triple in unguarded moments. It ran beneath the dressings and alternately burned and itched in the wounds there, as if Sawyer was being attacked by an angry swarm of fire ants that was miraculously passing everyone else by without so much as a nibble.

Sawyer grit his teeth until lightning bolts of pain radiated out from his jaw and into his brain, focusing on putting one step in front of the other with the aid of the walking stick and letting none of the strain show on his face. Not after he had had to jump through so many hoops to finagle his way onto this little expedition into the (God, how he wished) unknown in the first place, not when he was willing to bet that everyone else on the merry journey was privately thinking that he had gone round the bend and it was easier to just humor him. Not when Jack was still sneaking him those looks that he thought that Sawyer could not see, the ones that said that he was only waiting for the inevitable moment when Sawyer fell to pieces so that Jack could put him back together again. Sawyer grit his teeth together even harder whenever he happened to notice.

'Not going to happen, Doc,' he thought, feeling his mouth settle into a hard, bitter line. 'Not for one good roll.' A cramp got started in his left side, and he took the deepest breaths that the bandages binding his ribs would allow until it went away again. It would be a cold day in hell before let the group, including that boy bad reject, see him be coddled.

"Hey, hang on a minute," Kate said. "Everybody wait." She had fallen a little ways behind the group. When Sawyer turned to look, he saw her crouching down among the ferns and staring at them with an intensity that Sawyer had never seen from her before. Sawyer really could not see what was so different between the patch of ground that she was looking at and the one about two inches to the left, but, hey, Freckles was the expert.

Kate looked back up at the group when she realized that she had all of their attentions. There was a deep line drawn down between her eyes, one that Sawyer had seen on enough women to realize that it usually meant that they wanted something. Kate had to be the first one in his experience who could find that something by digging around in the dirt, though.

She crooked her finger at Locke, then pointed back at the jungle floor. Even by craning his neck and peering hard in the fading afternoon light, Sawyer still couldn't tell what was getting her all bothered. He was slightly gratified to look around and realize that he was not the only one in the dark. "Do you see this?" Kate asked Locke. "Tell me that I'm not imagining it."

Locke knelt down beside Kate with the ease of a man at least two decades younger and leaned to look at the patch of earth that she was indicating for him. The shadows had gotten long, and Locke had to stare for a long moment before he caught whatever it was that Kate wanted him to see. When he finally lifted his head, his expression was incredulous and, Sawyer thought, even a bit proud. "I never would have noticed that alone."

Kate lifted her shoulders into a shrug, but she still looked pleased. "Young eyes."

"And for the two of us who haven't learned to paint with all the colors of the wind?" Sawyer winced when he heard the exhaustion in his voice. So maybe the stoicism plan was not going as well as he could have hoped for.

Even with the sun setting through the trees, the self-satisfied gleam in Kate's eyes was unmistakable. "Someone came this way," she said. "And it was not one of our people. We're on the right track."

Michael bounced for a moment on the balls of his feet. Sawyer had watched him damned near vibrate with the need to be doing something useful for most of the afternoon, and it was starting to hurt to look at him. "Two goals in one," he said in a low voice that made the air flinch. "Let's move on."

Jack shook his head. "No, the best thing would be to stay here for the night." Michael jerked forward as if to protest and only halted when Jack raised his hand in a soothing gesture. "The sun is going down," he said, pointing through the trees. "Kate and Locke won't be able to track in the dark."

Michael took a deep breath that shuddered on the exhale and nodded reluctantly. Sawyer thought that Michael had been running on the very last of his reserves in order to get even that far. He was probably scraping at the bottom of the barrel even as he was still itching to go charging off into the woods, reason and logic be damned.

Sawyer shot Jack a look from beneath his lashes. He also had the feeling that their stopping for the night had more to do with giving him the chance to rest than it did the bullshit reason that Jack had given about signs. Jack was not so much as glancing in his Sawyer's direction, and his whole body was written in lines of indifference. If he was faking, then his acting skills had gotten a hell of a lot better over the past several hours.

Sawyer exhaled a sigh that was shakier than he liked and put a little additional weight onto his walking stick. It was carrying a lot more of him now than it had been when they had started out.

Sawyer wasn't mistaken this time when he saw Jack throw a glance his way, 'You're an idiot' written in giant letters all over his face. It was a look that Sawyer was well accustomed to being on the receiving end of, and he was strangely soothed by it. It was the little things between he and Jack that would never change.

Sawyer wondered if this was some new and strange variant of Stockholm syndrome that was taking hold of him, or else just really good sex.

"This is as good a place to camp as any," Jack went on. "We can all gather wood for a fire if we don't go too far. Enough people have been lost already."

Sawyer put a tree at his back and, using it as a brace, slowly lowered himself to the ground. He couldn't stop the soft noise of pain that worked its way past his lips, though he did bite down on the lower one until he tasted blood a second later. Sawyer licked at the tiny drops of blood that welled up there and smiled when his vision had stopped fading in and out. He had been playing this game for too long to get knocked down by a few new twists now. "You folks have fun with that," he said. "I think I'm going to cool my heels right where I am." The perfect finishing touch would have been to lace his hands behind his head, but Sawyer liked to think that he was leaving his masochistic days behind him. He settled for a grin.

"Finally, he has an excuse to sit on his arse," Charlie muttered as he drifted by. Sawyer made sure that his smile was even sweeter, just for him.

"Universe had to swing my way sooner or later, Elton," he replied.

"You're the one with the glasses."

Sawyer made a face at Charlie's back. Kate lifted her eyebrows at him, asking without words if he was going to be all right. Sawyer lifted a negligent hand at her until she too vanished into the growing shadows. The rest followed suit until Sawyer found himself with at least a few precious moments alone.

He tilted his head back until he could feel the rough bark of the tree digging into his scalp. The sweat on his temples and running down his spine soon began to grow uncomfortable and cold. "Okay, Dream Date," he said in a voice pitched so low that that even someone crouched right beside him would have had to strain in order to hear it. "Here's your chance. You want to throw a little something else my way, maybe convince me that I haven't gone right out of my mind, don't go thinking you have to be shy on my account."

The wind lifted in the trees, drying the last of the sweat on his body and whipping his hair into a cloud around his face. As far as answers went, that one was a bit more abstract than what Sawyer had been looking for. For one moment, he smelled a powerful flash of rain, of ozone, and then it was gone. He sighed, tilted his head back even further, and realized that while he had been otherwise occupied, his hands had slipped free of his control and begun playing absently with a patch of moss at his side. A cry of horror escaped from his throat and he threw the vegetation quickly away from himself. There were a few frightening seconds in which he thought that he would choke on the bile lodged in his throat.

"Sawyer?"

Sawyer's head jerked up. Kate had already returned to their camp with a stack of branches clutched beneath her arm. Her eyes were wide and concerned. "Are you all right?"

"Fine." Sawyer swallowed down the lump in his throat with some difficulty and shook his head. "I'm fine."

Kate gave him a dubious look as she knelt to get their fire started, but said nothing more. Sawyer leaned back against the tree. Dream Date, wherever she was, didn't seem terribly interested in talking to him again, leaving Sawyer with room to wonder if she had even existed in the first place. It was not one of the most comfortable thoughts to be having while the darkness was rushing forward so quickly.

---

They were all quiet and withdrawn as they settled in around the fire, watching as the flames dipped, danced, and turned their faces into barely-recognizable caricatures of themselves. Jack was not surprised that no one was in the mood for chatting, not with everything that had happened already and everything that could happen before they saw the other end of it. It wasn't an atmosphere that lent itself easily to campfire tales.

What did surprise him, though, was to look over and realize that the member of their group who was normally the loudest was now the most withdrawn. Sawyer spoke perhaps one word to every four spoken by the others, even Michael, and seemed preoccupied with stabbing the end of his walking stick into the fire every few moments so that he could watch the sparks swirl upwards. Even with the flames' constant movement, Jack saw that there were dark circles etched into the skin beneath Sawyer's eyes. He had some idea now of what the rest of the camp must see after he had gone a run of days without sleeping.

"I'll be back," Sawyer said abruptly, pulling the end of his walking stick out of the embers and using it to push himself up to his feet. He pulled his lips back into a grimace as he reached for his pack with his free hand. Sawyer did not spare any of them so much as a glance before he turned and disappeared into the trees.

Kate threw an alarmed glance Jack's way, but he was already rising to his feet and shaking his head. "I'll get him." He ignored the glances being thrown back and forth across the fire as the people left behind visibly wondered why he was being the one to bring Sawyer back, rather than Kate.

Jack followed the sound of Sawyer's progress through the trees, very aware as he did so that he was the leader of a small force traveling through unfamiliar territory. The weight of one of the two guns, hidden down in his pack, was a comfort.

He caught up with Sawyer within a small clearing, where the moonlight was coming down and covering them both in an eerie silver light. Jack thought that it made Sawyer look beautiful, but also mechanical and cold. He much preferred the way that Sawyer looked back by the fire.

Sawyer heaved a sigh when he heard Jack's approach that sounded as if it came from somewhere deep inside of him, somewhere that sounded like it hurt. He tilted his head back until he was looking almost directly up at the trees. "You know," Sawyer said over his shoulder to Jack, "I could have just been taking a piss." He was clenching the straps of his backpack hard enough to turn his knuckles into pearls.

"I didn't think that you would be shy about making an announcement if that was all that was wrong." Jack took a few steps closer. "So what is it?" He reached to take the pack from Sawyer and help him open it.

"I'm getting really sick of people asking me that question, that's what's wrong with me." Sawyer shoved the walking stick into Jack's waiting hand instead and opened the pack himself. "You and Kate have some major issues with control, has anyone ever told you that? Might want to think about letting go."

"You're not the first, or the second, or the third." Jack rested both of his hands on the top of the walking stick and watched as Sawyer pulled out both a bottle of water and the herbs that Sun had given him some hours before. His hands were trembling slightly with a tension that he could not control. Sawyer began counting out the leaves into the required half a palm's worth before Jack said, "You're going to have to boil that in water before it will work."

"Fuck!" Sawyer turned his face back up to the sky. It was one of the most desperate obscenities that Jack had ever heard.

"We still have the aspirin in you're in pain," Jack said. He realized that he was speaking as he would to an animal in a trap, one that had not yet shown him his teeth but could at any moment. "Sawyer, what's going on?"

"You're just going to keep on asking until you get an answer, aren't you?" Sawyer threw the leaves and the water pack into the pack as if they had personally angered him. The look that he turned over Jack suggested that it would only take a few more nudges to put him on that list as well.

"I'm not crazy," Sawyer muttered. He closed his eyes when he saw Jack raise his eyebrows. "And of course that's the perfect way to convince you that I am."

The first stirrings of anger that Jack had begun to feel now had to war against a genuine worry. "Sawyer?" he asked, unsure of what kind of response he was looking for. He pulled the pack away from Sawyer and dropped it onto the ground between them.

Sawyer opened his eyes. "I swear to God, you have got to be the most damned stubborn-"

Since Sawyer had started this, this whatever that it turned out to be by kissing him in the first place without warning, Jack thought it only fair that he should return the favor.

Sawyer's mouth was open to begin with but opened further at the first touch of Jack's lips, almost as if he was begging for the entry, for the distraction. Jack tangled one hand through Sawyer's hair and wound the other around his back, pulling him close until they were touching from shin to shoulder. Jack could feel it as Sawyer sighed and released some of his tension into Jack, some of whatever the hell it was that was making him feel as if he needed to question his own sanity. Jack returned the favor and gave back a little of his own worry about Locke and his lingering fears about Kate's own place in all of this, about what he thought he was doing leading a group of forty into war when he could barely manage their group of six.

Jack tugged Sawyer's lower lip between his teeth, opening up the small wounds that Sawyer had put there himself only a few hours earlier, and Sawyer made another one of those shiver-inducing sounds into Jack's mouth. They parted for a moment to catch their breaths, resting their foreheads against one another. Jack saw that Sawyer's eyes were open. He wondered if he had kept them open the entire time. Jack left his fingers twined through Sawyer's hair so that he could not pull away.

Not that Sawyer was even trying to. He closed his eyes and sighed, leaning even further into Jack and away from the desperate, fighting man that he had been only a few moments before. Jack did not think that he had even seen Sawyer looking so soft, so defeated. He vowed that he would do whatever he had to get the smart-assed fighter back.

"I'll tell you, Jack," Sawyer said after several long minutes went by in silence. Jack, realizing that Sawyer was trusting him with something far more important to him than his stash, said nothing. "When it's all over, I'll tell you." He sighed again. The bruises beneath his eyes seemed to grow even darker in response. "But I can't tell you anything else until then."

"Okay," Jack whispered before he kissed Sawyer again, slow and deep and as if he could pull the burden away just by willing it hard enough. He pulled away when the need for oxygen gave him no other choice, breathing hard through his nose. "We should get back."

"Just gonna wind me up and then that's it?" Sawyer whispered in response. They were keeping their voices pitched low, though Jack could not say why.

Jack snorted. "Try that line of argument on a teenaged girl. I doubt that you'll get much further." He tugged gently on Sawyer's hair and leaned in to murmur, "Heal up a little more and see what I'll do to you then."

Sawyer stared at him, a faint shadow of his old grin appearing on his face. "Don't think that you're going to get out of that one by saying that I was crazy and didn't hear you right."

Jack clapped Sawyer on the shoulder, and they turned as one creature back towards the camp. The only sounds were the crackling of leaves and of twigs beneath their feet and the scurrying of small animals as they moved to get out of their way. Sawyer fell back into the inner world that had claimed him fro the past several hours, and with the shadows pressing close around them and the wind whispering secrets through the trees overhead Jack was very tempted to do the same. The forest was eerie and only half real in that light, as if someone had thrown down the seeds of a fairy tale and the island was fertile ground. It was very easy, then, to be tempted by all of Locke's pronouncements that the island was a magic place. Jack felt his lips twist.

The beacon that was their fire came back into sight within a few moments. Jack's feet sped up automatically in order to meet it. By his side, Sawyer did the same.

It was probably a mistake, that fire. If it was drawing Jack and Sawyer this efficiently, then all number of other things could also be scuttling through the dark towards it. Jack's lips settled into a hard line. No; they had made enough changes in their lives as it was. Damned if they were going to let their light be taken from them as well. Jack would fight every single one of the Others down to the ground himself before he allowed that to happen.

Locke looked up from his scrutiny of the fire when Jack and Sawyer stepped back into the camp. "Dangerous to go that far out," was all that Locke said, but there was still a note of concern in his voice.

Sawyer leaned his walking stick against one of the trees and held up his hands in a gesture of mock surrender. "Easy there. The sheriff brought me back safe and sound, so you'll still get to poke around in your precious rabbit hole." The strained and uncertain Sawyer that Jack had glimpsed only minutes before was long gone, nothing more than a trick of moonlight and shadow. Were if not for the purple circles beneath his eyes and the marks on his lower lip, Jack would have thought that they were still back at the beach. Kate would only look at either of them for a few seconds at a time before she returned to staring moodily into the fire.

"You're a real rebel without a clue, you know that?" Jack asked, not unkindly, at the same moment that Locke said, "This is every bit as much your mystery as it is mine."

For one second, Jack saw Sawyer with every one of his defenses stripped away. Sawyer's breath caught in his throat. Jack thought that he and Locke must have been the only ones who saw the look that crossed Sawyer's face then, patterned and camouflaged by the shadows of the dwindling fire.

Whatever Sawyer was not telling him, it was huge and it was terrible. Jack thought of the feeling that he had gotten on the way back, that of reality slipping away and a fairytale coming to take its place. The real kind, before Disney could come along and sanitize it for mass consumption. Jack snorted from the back of his throat and fought hard to avoid giving a self-deprecating shake of his head. If he let the atmosphere start getting to him now, after everything else that he had seen, then he would never come back from the brink.

He had gotten a promise out of Sawyer, and that was enough. Let Sawyer keep his secrets held like treasures for now. If those secrets were going to put them all in danger when Jack was still willing to kick his ass for him. Had Sawyer been able to read the contents of Jack's thoughts then, Jack thought that he might even have smiled.

Sawyer was still staring hard at Locke, but his mask was firmly back in place, buckled tight and not likely to slip anytime soon. "Never had the patience for mysteries," he said as he found a patch of ground that look comfortable enough to spend the night on and lowered himself down gingerly. "Always preferred the shoot 'em ups."

"You might get your wish," Charlie said. Michael stared moodily into the fire and said nothing.

Jack laid down with a rustling of leaves and felt Sawyer's eyes sliding over him from head to foot in response. Given the two clashing encounters that they had already had, it was probably dangerous for them to be sleeping so closely to one another when they were hardly in a private setting, but Jack decided then and there that the light was not the only thing that he was not going to allow to be taken from him.

Jack was not good at letting go. As far as character flaws went, he thought that he could live with that.

From the corner of his eye, Jack saw Sawyer glance towards the backpack that still held the mystery leaves. A moment later, he heard him mutter, "Fuck it, I ain't gonna help her." Thinking that Sawyer was talking about Sun, Jack felt his brow wrinkling, but he decided to keep his peace.

They all hunkered down in the light of the dying fire and did their best to sleep.

---

"What's wrong, babe, did your emissary get tired of waiting on you? I'll bet good help is even harder to find among the undead." Sawyer rotated his shoulder as he spoke and took a deep, chest-expanding breath. He did not feel so much as a twinge of pain from either movement. That was the one side effect of these expeditions into the Twilight Zone that he was not going to miss.

He took a few further steps towards the mysterious and maddening figure who was seated on the same tree stump where Sawyer had first seen Boone only two nights before. The unnaturally golden fire dipped and swayed between them, reaching out long fingers towards Dream Date as if it wanted to caress her. Or wring her neck. That was one impulse that Sawyer could understand without too much trouble.

"Or did he finally figure out where that light was and head towards it?" Sawyer continued. "I would have liked to see that."

Dream Date smiled. Sawyer wished that she hadn't. It was worse when she was trying to be human than when she just gave up and let herself be creepy. "He has other methods of distracting himself," she said, folding her hands together on her knees. Dream Date was wearing a loose white shift that fell over her in oversized folds and eliminated any hint of sexuality that she might have had, so that Sawyer's belief in her femininity came about not so much from observation as from instinct. Dream Date's hands were every bit as white as her dress, and when she placed them against the fabric Sawyer had to squint in order to see where one ended and the other began. She tilted her head to one side as she caught him looking, as if she wanted to ask, "Well?" but thought that such an action was beneath her.

"What?" Sawyer asked. He folded his arms over his chest and leaned back against one of the nearby trees, keeping a good distance between himself and both the fire and the scarcely human thing beyond it. He wondered if the few scant yards would even do him any good, should it come down to that. "You looking for a progress report or something?" Sawyer smirked. "You told me to move my ass. Fine. If it will get you out of my head any faster, I'll move it."

Dream Date hardly blinked. "That was the means," she said in her flat, atonal way. "That was not the end. You took one."

"And I have to give one back, yeah, I got that memo the last three or four times that you sent it." Sawyer made an exasperated noise and dragged his hand through his hair. "Listen, Dream Date, I-" He cut himself off and let out an unhealthy laugh. "Do you even have a name, or can I draw whatever I want out of a hat? Because I think that I could get creative for you, baby doll."

Dream Date opened her mouth, only to close it again without saying a word. She looked as surprised as she was capable of looking, in her inhumanly composed way. "I never learned it," she said. A softness entered her voice that made Sawyer scale back her age by at least a decade, turning her into a woman not by years nearly so much as by will. If the flat and unflinching stare that she fixed on him was any kind of indicator, then she already had plenty of that. Sawyer wondered if whoever had taken her life realized what kind of mistake that they had made.

Sawyer took a deep breath, shook his head, and went on, "Life's a bitch. You probably already know how the rest of that saying ends." Dream Date raised her eyebrows at him. "But what I did in Australia, I can't reverse it, you got that? I can't give one back." Sawyer's face hardened. "And I hate to break it to you, honey-pie, but I ain't going on this adventure for you. I _am_ going to get that boy back."

Dream Date's face changed at the first mention of Walt, becoming even more contemptuous and cold. "So you can't give one back without also taking one," she said. Her glittering teeth were even whiter than her skin. Dream Date leaned forward to peer at him closely, pulling her dress tight across her breasts. Sawyer's mental estimate of her age when down by another five years. Dream Date folded her hands beneath her chin in a gesture that would have been coquettish on anyone else. "That puts you into quite the difficult situation, doesn't it?"

---

Sawyer lurched awake between one second and the next, noticing that the fire had died down to no more than a few red and gleaming embers. The smell of motor oil was heavy in his nose, and the growing louder by the second was the buzzing of bees.

---

Jack woke up when Sawyer's arm struck him in the chest hard enough to drive all of the air out of his lungs. He sat up, got a quick whiff of motor oil and heard the sound of buzzing all around him, and found his breath again to yell, "Everyone! Wake up NOW!" Over the sound of insects, he couldn't hear if anyone was actually obeying him.

Something slammed into the back of Jack's hand, tearing a long furrow across the skin that began to burn and fill with blood immediately. Jack swore but did not pull back his hand. Instead, he reached for Sawyer.

Sawyer jerked as soon as Jack touched him, raising his fist for a second as if he meant to take a swing at him. Even in the darkness, Jack could see that his eyes were opened wide and the whites were shining. "Not now, man," Jack said, hauling him to his feet instead. Sawyer yelped in pain and fell against him, but there was no time to worry about that now. "We have to move."

"No," Sawyer said, setting his heels into the earth and pulling back hard. "That's the wrong direction."

Jack was used to Sawyer saying the most nonsensical things that he could conceive of, was even comforted by it, but now was not the time. "What?" He gaped. Jack ducked away as something whizzed by his ear, something that he strongly suspected would have had teeth if he had allowed it to get close enough. "Sawyer, now is not the time-"

Kate screamed at the exact moment that something tugged hard on his other arm, and for one second Jack was suspended between two warring sets of instincts and with nowhere else to go. Sawyer was gone by the time that he turned back to look. He should not have been able to move that fast while injured-could not have moved that fast while injured. Jack swore again, flinched away, and the cloud around him grew that much thicker.

Doctor or leader, Jack thought bitterly. Hell of a time. Someone that he could not see tugged or Jack's arm, so he let himself be led in that direction, smelling for a moment decay and rain, towards the sound of Kate's voice and the job that he had to do.

He didn't think that job included the ground opening up beneath his him without warning, dropping him down an incredible distance before he cracked his head on a hard surface and was not in the position to do any job at all.

End Part Sixteen


	17. Chapter 17

Part Seventeen

Hurley put the gun away as soon as Jack's shadow disappeared from sight and made a solemn vow not to look at it again until they had all returned. He was scared that his gaze, even his proximity, would be enough to cause the gun to go off. The bullet would miss him entirely, of course, and put a hole in some unsuspecting bystander right when they had no doctor to plug it back up again.

"I told him that he shouldn't have given it to me," Hurley muttered as he removed the gun's clip like Jack had shown him. His hands were shaking so badly that he was surprised when all of the bullets didn't just explode then and there and get it over with. He put the clip into one end of his pack and the…what was the rest of the gun called?

"Definitely told him that he should not have given it to me," Hurley went on. He put the part-that-was-not-the-clip into the opposite end of the pack, as far away from the bullets as he could manage before deciding that even that was too close. Hurley pulled the clip out and put it into Steve's pack instead, reasoning that a good scare was better than a gunshot wound any day. He sighed and stood, swiping his hand across the prickle of cold sweat that had broken out across his forehead.

The latest shift of sentries came in and a new set went out with hardly a word needing to be spoken. They nodded to one another as they passed their torches and makeshift weapons from one set of hands to the other. More than a few nodded to Hurley, too. Even if it wasn't official, most of the people in the camp still thought of Jack as their leader. If he had passed that leadership onto Hurley when he left, then that was good enough for them.

Hurley could spend the rest of the night writing a treatise on why that was not one of Jack's better ideas, but the thought that if he stayed away from the gun, the knives, rocks, or anything else that had even the slightest suggestion of an edge he might be able to make it work. The way things were standing now, the camp hardly even needed a leader, anyway. The disappearance of so many people in so short a span of time had spurred everyone into a frenzy of action that they hadn't seen since the first days after the crash. Anyone who wasn't out on a shift as a sentry or eating and resting from their last shift of doing just that was making weapons as quickly as they could, raiding Locke's stash of knives and strapping them onto the ends of sticks to make spears. Once the knives were all taken, a few people dismantled a clutch of the new spears temporarily so that they could sharpen the sticks themselves, shoving the ends of each one briefly into the fire to harden them.

Hurley saw one man sifting through the scattered bits of fuselage that they had yet to find a use for until he found a piece of roughly the correct size and shape to become a crude ax. At the moment, his biggest problem was in finding a way to attach it to something without cutting his hands to pieces in the process. Hurley tilted his head to one side as the dude with the metal continued to struggle. If he wasn't careful, he was going to cut one of his fingers right off. Hurley got to his feet.

"Try, like, notching it or something," he said.

"What?" When the guy looked up, Hurley realized that he was the same one that Jack had treated for heat rash over a month before. Other than a lingering dusting of red on the sides of his neck, he had acquired a tan since then so deep as to render him nearly unrecognizable.

"Notching it," Hurley repeated. "Splitting the wood?" He took it from the guy long enough to show him what he meant. "So that you can slide the metal down into it and not cut up your hands." He paused and looked at the remnant of the fuselage for a moment. "Might want to find one of Locke's whetstones and see about getting it even sharper, too."

"Thanks." Rash Guy took the metal back, handling it gingerly. "How do you know that, anyway?"

"I'm a practical guy," Hurley deadpanned. "Also, Xena reruns. I was all about Gabrielle."

Rash Guy leaned back and stared Hurley in the face for a long time, as if he was trying to decide whether or not Hurley was joking and kept changing his mind from one second to the next. "I liked Callisto," he said at last, leaning back over his work.

"Aside from the crazy thing, who didn't?" Hurley rose back to his feet and looked around for something to do, someone to talk to. Everyone was busy with their own jobs, though, and most of the people that Hurley knew well where either missing or out on a mission to find the missing people and bring them back. Claire was talking to Tracy on the other end of the cave, but Hurley could not forget that Tracy was the one who had nominated the potential lunatic for public office. He steered towards the infirmary cave instead. If nothing else, he would make sure that there were enough bandages if Jack should come back with injured people. A soft glow in the doorway let him know that someone was already there.

It was Sun, tending to her plants just as Hurley had thought that she would be. Jin was also in there with her, which Hurley had to admit that he had not seen coming. Jin was sitting against the far wall on the pallet that Sawyer had vacated only hours before, his knees drawn up and his hands braced across the top of them. The look in his eyes as he watched Sun move was almost enough to make Hurley wish that he had walked in on them having sex; it probably would have been less intimate. Sun and Jin, not realizing yet that Hurley was also there, continued the soft conversation that they were having in Korean, the notes dropping like ripples across water in the otherwise perfect stillness.

"Hey, guys, sorry. I didn't realize that I was interrupting anything." Hurley flushed and stared tot duck back out again before Sun told him with a gesture that it was all right. He lifted his hand in greeting to Jin. "Yo."

Jin raised his hand back and answered in Korean. Sun had brought only a single torch into the cave with her, so that deep hollows were painted into all of their faces and the corners of the cave were completely given over to shadows. Jin and Sun already had the atmosphere and, before Hurley arrived, the intimacy. All that they had really lacked was a bottle of wine and a waiter hovering around in the background. Hurley became very aware of his presence as an intruder once more and began edging back towards the door. "You guys already look like you have something going here, so I think I'll just mosey. I was really only going to make up some more bandages."

Sun pointed towards an open suitcase that had already been shoved into one corner and piled high with unclaimed clothing torn into long strips. "I was restless earlier, also," she explained. Sun threw a glance towards the side entrance as a bird cried from somewhere deeper within the jungle.

"That transparent, huh?" Hurley grinned ruefully as he, too, glanced out into the darkness. There was a glow moving through the trees from a long ways off, but the sentries had begun taking torches out with them when it grew dark. "I know the two of you were looking for some alone time, but would you take your plants into the main cavern and look after them there?" Sun looked at him in confusion. "Call me crazy, but I really don't like how easy it would be for someone else to slip in here through that door." His voice, he noted, sounded much calmer than he actually felt. There was a sense of nervousness bordering on outright panic moving through him that he could not help but associate with the increasingly hysterical months leading up to his hospitalization, though he figured that if he could survive a plane crash and close to two months on an island that liked to eat people without cracking up again he could probably call himself cured.

"All right," Sun said slowly, her eyes never leaving his, as if she wanted to ask further questions but wasn't sure where to start. She began collecting her plants, though, and that was good enough.

Jin jumped to his feet with warning and spun towards the side entrance, firing off something in fast Korean. Sun's fingers tightened to the point of bloodlessness around the pot that she was carrying.

"What?" Hurley asked. "What is it?"

"He says that he smells a great deal of smoke," Sun said tightly. At the same moment, the glow that Hurley had seen among the trees moments before flared into something too bright to have possibly come from a single torch, so brilliant that it turned all of the trees into reaching, skeletal fingers and bleached the color away from everything else. A huge booming sound reverberated through the jungle, and the sentries in their various positions began to shout.

"Everyone get into the main cavern," Hurley ordered both Sun and Jin before he leaned out and called the same thing to the remaining sentries. "Now!" A breeze blew towards him from where the explosion had taken place and a fire was now growing in earnest. The wind was already hot enough to make his face hurt.

Sun started to race into the cavern, but Hurley grabbed quickly at her arm. "No, wait a minute. On second thought, help me with these things." He gestured towards the bandages and the pallet.

"We don't need these things." Sun had jumped and lost her grip on the pot when the explosion had happened, so that there were now pieces of gourd and clumps of dirt rolling about underfoot.

Hurley felt a tight, grim smile spreading across his face. Jesus, and he was the leader of all this. "We will before it's over," he said. He pointed towards the orange glow that was growing closer and stronger by the moment. "And even if we don't, I don't want anything flammable left in here."

Though Sun's eyes were wide, she took a deep breath and nodded, making a visible effort to calm down. She slammed the suitcase closed and struggled to lift it. Jin went to help her while Hurley rolled the pallet up and threw it over his shoulder. Every time that the wind blew towards the caves now, Hurley had to fight so as not to choke on the smell of smoke and ash.

The main cavern was pure chaos when they emerged into it and threw their supplies down in the center of the floor. Hurley held up his hands for, if not silence, then at least a softening of the roar, knowing as he did so that he had about as much chance of success as a kid who stood on the beach and tried to throw the ocean back with his bucket.

While he was trying this, three more sentries staggered in. Two of them Hurley knew by their faces alone; the third was Nina, the social worker. She had volunteered for a second round of sentry duty only an hour before. All three of them were sporting minor burns across their faces and hands and smelled of singed hair. Nina was carrying one of the spears that had been made from Locke's knives, and the blade was as dark with blood as her face was white with the absence of it.

"There are people out there," she told Hurley. "And they're not crazy about us."

"That was what I was afraid of," Hurley muttered to himself, too softly for anyone else to hear even if they had been listening. He held his hands up higher. "Okay!" When he got no response, Hurley drew every bit of air that he could manage into his lungs and bellowed, "HEY!"

It wasn't an immediate silence, but it would have to do. Every eye in the caves turned towards him, even those of little Aaron, who was working himself up to a full-blown wail and being frantically shushed by Claire. Hurley took a deep breath and said, "I need everyone to get all of their clothing, bedding, and anything else that they think might catch a spark away from the entrances and put it into the center of the cave." Hurley paused for a moment, thinking of the time in seventh grade when he had tried to give a speech in English and had wound up puking across his shoes.

"Who cares?" someone yelled from the back of the crowd. Hurley could not see the person's face, but the voice sounded young and scared. "We need to get down to the beach, where at least we won't be trapped."

Murmurs of agreement began to rise up from all quarters. Hurley could already feel himself losing them. He bunched his hands into fists and stood his ground, refusing to allow any emotion other than calm to show on his face. He might not have the Insta-Hero allure of Jack or the Pied Piper skills of Locke, but for some reason the title of leader had been passed on to him in their absence. That had to mean something.

Besides, Hurley reasoned, the universe had never been discriminating in dealing out his bad luck before. He figured that it was about time that it started touching on the bad guys as well as the good. As if the forces of karma wanted to assure him that they were on the same page, there was a boom and a series of several yells out in the jungle. Hurley took a quick glance around and saw that all of his people were right there.

"No," Hurley said. He refused to raise his voice above a normal speaking volume. If he had to do that, some part of him knew, then he had already lost them. "We moved up here because we can defend ourselves better from the caves than we can from the beaches. Who wants to lay money that the Others are out there thinking the exact same thing right now?"

"Hurley, they've set the jungle on fire," Claire said. Her skin had gone so pale that she seemed to float rather than to walk up to the front of the crowd, a ghost instead of a woman. She had passed Aaron off into someone else's arms for the moment, and without him her hands were clenching and unclenching themselves into restless fists at her sides.

"Yeah, to drive us right off of a cliff." They were listening to him. Hurley felt a brief surge of triumph. "We're in a fortress made of stone," he said. "It's not going to burn easily." So maybe he wasn't the kind of leader who showed up in action movies or…any other kind of movie, ever, but he did all right.

A bullet flew through one of the cave entrances, striking Rash Guy in the throat and taking him down without a sound. Hurley decided that he had pissed off the universe so thoroughly at some point that it was going to make him continue to pay for this sin for the rest of his life. They only reason that its malice never affected him directly was because the universe was one of the spiteful, heinous jocks that he had known in high school and wanted to draw the process out as much as possible.

Finding out that the cosmos was a lot like the years that he had hated more than any other in his life was not one of the most pleasant revelations that he could have had at the moment. Hurley pressed his lips together until his jaw ached. "New plan," he announced, breaking his own rule and raising his voice just a little. "Everyone out of the caves, but no one goes back to the beach. They're trying to panic us. Fine. I am really not going to have any trouble faking that part. We haven't been making weapons for nothing, though, and I want to fight."

Hurley did not think that he had ever been looked at before like everyone was looking at him now. They began to disperse in small groups, everyone that could fight gathering homemade weapons in their hands and throwing their shoulders back in something that was either determination or the rigidity of pure fear. Hurley thought that a good argument could be made for both. He took several deep breaths until some of the fear slid out of him, or at least went to a place where he could control it.

Jin rushed past him, already holding one of their makeshift spears in his hand. "Hey, man, wait!" Jin drifted to a stop, wearing a confused expression. He threw his arm out to indicate the side entrance before he answered. "Yeah, I know. Hang on." He led Jin over to his bad and Steve's, where the gun still rested in its two separate pieces. "I want you to take this." Jin's eyes widened when Hurley tried to push the pieces into his hand. He shook his head and tried to step back, his expression becoming a little sick.

"Trust me, man," Hurley said, pushing the gun into Jin's hands again. "Very bad things will happen if I use this."

Jin said something else, his expression becoming dark for a moment, and then finally took the gun from Hurley's hands. After a moment of experimentation, he slid the clip into place with a soft click and turned the safety off. He looked past Hurley to where Sun was setting the last of the clothing into the pile in the center of the cave. She was not looking at her husband, did not see the gun in his hands. Jin nodded to Hurley and slid out of the cave.

Hurley and Sun were the only two left. Hurley paused and muttered a quick prayer to himself before he knelt to draw Rash Guy's eyes closed. He picked up the axe that Rash Guy had been making earlier and shifted it in his hands until it felt comfortable, if not precisely natural. "Are you ready?" he asked Sun.

She nodded and looked around for a moment before she picked up one of the final spears. Its end was still black with soot from being forced into the fire. Sun looked even stranger holding the spear than Hurley felt with the axe. Terrified though she looked, her hands were not shaking. They both flinched as they heard bullets thudding against the exterior wall of the cave.

"We are running out of time," Sun said. Hurley took her free hand and tugged her outside.

The jungle was always an eerie place to be at night, the bright green of the ferns and the trees transformed into inky shadows that seemed to stretch and reach for the unwary. The rich hothouse smell of things growing and things dying was thicker in the dark, when there were no day breezes to come in from the sea and bring with them the cleansing scent of salt.

Smoke obliterated even the faintest remaining traces of the ocean now, and the fire turned everything into flashes of red and yellow. By breathing very deeply, Hurley thought that he could smell rain on the horizon, but in the end he could not tell if it was real or only wishful thinking. The shadows crawling out of the furnace were very much real, though, and Hurley knew at a look that they were not his people. None of his people moved like that, like sleek animals trapped in human form by mistake rather than by intention of nature. Light flashed off the barrels of guns.

Hurley put his hand into the small of Sun's back and pushed her forward ahead of him, both of them bent over nearly double in an effort to avoid the bullets pinging off the rocks above them. The torches that they had set out in front of the caves now didn't seem like such a great idea.

A shape rose out from the darkness. Before Hurley recognized who it was, he had come very close to putting the blade of his new weapon into Jin's throat. Only Sun's cry of joy and greeting stopped his hand before he did something irreversible and terrible. Jin said something, and Sun translated, "He says that everyone is already scattered through the woods."

A bullet whined inches above their heads, striking the rock behind them and spraying both Sun and Hurley with shrapnel. They all ducked, and Hurley swore. Jin raised his arm and fired back as the three of them dove into the trees.

Hurley shifted his grip on the axe, feeling it slide around in the sweat that soaked his palms, and swung it at the first thing that came at him.

The blade never came entirely clean.

--

Claire wanted to say that she had never been this frightened before in her life, that every moment where she was able to keep herself moving and away from the edge of panic was a victory. She also wanted to say that this was silly, that of course she had been more terrified than this before. She had survived a plane crash and a kidnapping by the very same people that were chasing her through the jungle and trying to kill them all now, she had to have been more scared than this before. She _had_ to have been.

But she still could not remember for sure, and so far as Claire was concerned there was nothing in the world that could be more frightening than that single fact.

She ran through the trees as fast as she was able with Aaron clutched to her chest, Nina flanking her on one side and Steve on the other. They were both carrying weapons. Had Claire had the time to grab the sling that Charlie had made for her before they had to flee, she also would be carrying one. The very thought of someone taking Aaron from her, hurting him, filled her with anger of an intensity that she had ever felt before. Not that she could remember, and that took her straight back to her original question.

'I've done this before,' Claire thought as something that was not quite memory, but wanted to be, ran across the surface of her mind. 'I know this.' Aaron was screaming in fear loudly enough to wake the dead, something that Claire was less willing to rule out as a possibility by the second, his tiny face scrunched and red. Claire made only infrequent and half-hearted attempts to soothe him as she followed Nina through the trees. Her temples felt as if they were being seized in a vice, while a black buzzing noise was growing louder by the second in her head. The onset of another one of her headaches, and Claire did not think that she could have picked a worse time if she had sat down and tried. She had never told Jack about the migraines that had begun to strike her with greater and greater frequency since Aaron had been born, thinking that he would only medicate them away, when every time that one stuck her she came that much closer to getting two weeks of her life back.

A bolt of pain spiraled through Claire's head, doubling her over and making her cry out. Only a split-second tightening of her arms kept her from dropping Aaron. Sensing either the near-miss, her distress, or both, he screamed that much louder.

"_This isn't the right one," Ethan says, though Claire is barely even listening to him. Her stomach clenches in another spasm that she prays is not a labor pain, and Charlie, Charlie, where is Charlie?_

"_Then find it and get rid of it." She smells ozone and rain, something almost like the smell of freshly turned earth and growing things, and when Claire lifts her face it was to stare into eyes every bit as green as the jungle itself. "Before they replace the girl."_

_She shrieks, jerks backwards, and drags her hands down Ethan's face when he tries to reach for her. The small of earth dissipates as Claire spins away and dashes off through the jungle for all that she's worth_.

"Is there any way to make him be quiet?" Steve asked urgently. Claire came back to herself, clutching her free hand to her temples as the pain threatened to drive her to her knees. While she had drifted to a stop, the fire was eating up the jungle at a speed that almost seemed to defy nature, coming close enough to make her skin hurt. She shifted Aaron in her arms until he was in a more comfortable position, but he did not stop crying.

"Babies don't usually work like that." Nina paused and looked over her shoulder at Claire. The most colorful things on her face were her burns, but her hands were not shaking and her voice was steady. "You're going to have to move faster than that, dear."

"Okay." Claire rubbed at her temples one final time as the pain withdrew a little farther, so that the world was at the very least no longer spinning around as if it had been tipped into a blender. Almost a memory, but not quite, and every time a new headache hit she hated it as much as she realized that she needed it. Claire found a certain satisfaction in watching the green jungle burn, though, and could not say why.

A bullet whined through the trees, catching Steve in the thigh with a spurt of blood and a terrible noise as the flesh gave way. He yelled and dropped to the ground as Claire screamed and Nina gasped. Nina dropped her spear and rushed to Steve's side, putting her hands over the wound and pushing down hard. Even so, her fingers and Steve's leg were soaked within seconds.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," Nina moaned. Steve had his lower lip drawn between his teeth and was biting down hard, so hard that he was going to draw even more blood that he could not afford to lose if he was not careful. Though he had yet to make another sound, his face was white with pain. "I don't think that it hit an artery, but I can't tell." She looked up at Claire. "Take Steve's spear and get to Hurley. He'll keep you safe."

Nina cast a dubious look around at the flames and the jungle as she finished speaking, and Claire knew that she was wondering who would keep her and Steve safe. Claire was wondering the same thing, herself. Their shooter had still not shown himself. "Will you be all right?" she asked, taking Steve's spear as Hurley offered it to her. Holding it and Aaron at the same time was awkward, and Claire was terrified that she was going to drop either one or both of them.

Nina shook her head and began cutting up long strips from both hers and Steve's shirts so that she could wind them around his leg. "Don't know."

Another bullet flew by, striking a tree trunk only a few feet away and sending shrapnel flying out in every direction. All three of them ducked. Wincing, Steve sat up so that he could help Nina tie off his leg. "Honey, you had better shag ass if you're going to."

Claire nodded even though she hated it and spun around. She took off through the jungle as fast as she was able with lungs that were getting as much smoke as they were good air, unable to shake the feeling that she had done this before. But Ethan had not carried a gun. Claire did not know how she remembered that, and but she did, and she knew that it could not be a good thing if she was being pursued by an entirely new and fun group of people who did.

Well, Claire thought in a blend of fog and clarity that could only come from being balanced on the edge of terror, as much as being chased by people with guns could ever be said to be a good thing. She wondered how she was possibly supposed to find Hurley in this chaos, how she was supposed to tell the castaways from their enemies, and how Aaron's screaming wasn't drawing every single one of the bad guys straight towards them.

The last question was answered when a man that Claire had never seen before leaped out of the shadows and the flames as if they had birthed him. Even if there were a few among their group whose names that Claire did not know or that the memories of meeting had been stolen from her, she never would have mistaken that man for one of theirs. Ethan had moved like some unholy blend of cat and insect when he tried to take her back, that much she could remember, and this man did the same…but something was still off. Something was not right.

Shannon had struck up a conversation with Claire in the few terrible hours in which Aaron had been missing, trying in her own blunt and often inexperienced way to distract Claire and make her feel better. One of the topics that Shannon had tried before recognizing it as a bad job and giving up was that of how to tell the designer item from the knockoff. It was in the stitching, Shannon had explained, the fine details. The eye had to be trained before it could tell the quality from the trash.

Yes, Claire thought as she jumped backwards and could not halt her one small scream. It was like that. She had spent more time than anyone else on the island in Ethan's company. Even if she could not remember great chunks of it, there was an impression of Ethan that would always be driven into her subconscious, tattooed so deeply that it had become instinct. This man was not like Ethan; he imitated him, but could not stick the details. If Shannon had been there, she would have said that the new man was the Foley's clearance rack to Ethan's Gucci.

He was filthy, was one of the first things that Claire noticed through her fear. Bedraggled and dirty, with a series of burn scars dotting one cheek that looked as if they had never seen a doctor's attention and an open wound on his neck that oozed a sullen flow of pus. It clotted in the dirt caked there to create a sticky, foul mess that reeked even above the smoke. More than that, he smelled scared and desperate, but Claire was not in the mood to be kind. The new man did not seem to see her at all, his eyes focused only on Aaron.

"Yes," he said, extending his hands out to her in a gesture that would have been pleading if he was not holding a gun, shiny and much cleaner than the rest of him, in his hand. Claire wondered if he had been the one to shoot Steve, and her grip on her spear tightened. "He'll do; we can make him do. Give him to me."

"No!" Claire shouted. His voice came out high and frightened. "No, you can't have him." She lifted her spear into an awkward defensive stance, very aware of the fact that it was the first time that she had ever held one, and took a step backwards. The sky had begun to pile over with thick, angry clouds some moments before, so that if not for the flames they would both be blind.

Claire did not think that the man even realized that she was there until she spoke, so focused on Aaron was he. His gaze flicked up to her face for only a second before he went to watching Aaron again. There was a look there that was beyond calculation, beyond evil, and focused on pure human need. She clutched Aaron more tightly to herself in response. He began to wail again, after previously falling into a breathless quiet.

"We need him," the man said quietly, his free hand coming up briefly to swipe at the mess on his neck. Claire's nose wrinkled and she only barely stopped herself from gagging. "You don't understand." Again Claire got the impression that she was only accidental to the conversation, that he could just as easily be having it with himself. The hand that held the gun began to drift in small circles, as if he honestly did not know where to point it.

Claire's hand was starting to slip in sweat, but she wasn't about to retreat another step backwards. She was not sure that she would even be able to, not with how close the fire was growing. "Need him for _what_?" she could not stop herself from blurting out.

But the man didn't answer her, and the gun was beginning to shake wildly in his hand. He was staring at a point just beyond her shoulder and Claire knew, _knew_ that she should not turn to look, knew that she was fulfilling every single horror movie cliché that she and her friends had enjoyed throwing popcorn at while they were still in school, but she could not help herself. She swiveled about.

The greenest eyes that Claire had ever seen stared back at her, distinguishable from the surrounding jungle only by the fact that so much of it was in flames. Her hair was long and of a dusky, nondescript brown, and her face was broad and unremarkable. Aaron stopped crying immediately and goggled, waving his hands in the air. Claire had no idea who she should be pointing the spear at. "Me," the woman said, and curved her lips into a bright smile. Aaron screamed with laughter and kicked so hard that it was all that Claire could not to drop him.

Oh. That was who she should be pointing her weapon at. It was so nice to have clarity in these kinds of things.

"You aren't supposed to be-" the man began. "You aren't supposed to be-" He kept cutting himself off, like a CD with a scratch in it. Claire didn't even know which one of them was being addressed until the woman with the vibrant green eyes smiled again. This time, she showed teeth. The man raised his gun at her, his hand shaking wildly, and Claire ducked as she heard a shot.

The man that had been menacing her dropped without a sound, one hand coming up for a moment to flutter at his temple before it fell back. There was a small, neat hold passing through his skull on one side, a larger one on the other. Claire swallowed back her scream only through an act of will.

Aaron didn't, though, shrieking and kicking at her so hard that Claire instinctively began to check him over to see in anything was sticking him, so sudden was his change in mood. She glanced over her shoulder. The woman was gone. As she was not one of their own and was just as clearly not an Other, had it not been for her own attacker's reaction to her Claire would have wondered if she was even real at all. 'Have your psychotic break later.' She spun around, clutching Aaron to her chest, as she heard her name being called. There was a crack of thunder, a strong whiff of ozone, and the heavens opened up.

Jin rushed towards her in the sudden downpour, holding a gun in one hand. Claire felt slightly better for knowing where her rescue had come from. She barely glanced at the fallen Other was she rushed towards Jin in the rain.

"Did you see her?" Claire asked as soon as they were close enough to speak to one another. Even knowing that Jin would not understand her, she could not stop herself; there was a desperate need for someone, anyone to share the experience with her and assure her that it was real. Jin's face turned from worried and angry to confused as she asked something of her, so that Claire threw her arm back behind her. "The woman, the-"

The woman who was still not there, not anywhere that Claire could see. She had come up behind them without a sound, Claire told herself firmly, and she could leave just as quickly. Never mind that the rain was beginning to put the fire out, leaving behind only long black skeletons that didn't seem capable of hiding anything. 'Psychotic. Break. Later.'

"Never mind," Claire said as she turned back to Jin. She was beginning to shiver in the wet, and Aaron's screaming and the rolling of the thunder were competing for the loudest sounds in the world. "We have to find Hurley."

Jin's face cleared at the mention of Hurley's name. He nodded, said something in swift Korean, and gestured for her to follow him. Claire wanted very badly to grab at his hand and draw comfort from it, but she wanted even less to let go of the spear.

In the pouring rain, they looked for Hurley.

--

If was an example of his competence at leadership, Hurley thought in a moment of near-panic, then Jack probably would have been better off leaving it to the flip of a coin. He had no plan. He didn't know where anyone was, or how many of them were dead. What he did know was they were outnumbered, outgunned, and in very serious trouble. If Locke's island totem or whatever the hell he called it really wanted to start bringing forth miracles, now would be a great time to get on with it.

Sun clung close to Hurley's side, shivering violently in the icy rain that had begun to fall a few moments before. It had gone from drizzle to downpour with barely a second's pause in between, putting out the fires and sluicing things that Hurley really preferred not to think about off of his arms and hands. On the one hand, without the fire and smoke obscuring everything, they could not see what they were going up against. On the other…they could now see what they were going up against.

Yep. Anytime that miracle wanted to happen, Hurley was not going to argue with it.

Nina had showed up leading an injured Steve only a few moments before, and the four of them were being backed slowly towards the caves again, keeping a distance of about fifty yards between themselves and people that the rain didn't seem to be making any cleaner and surely couldn't be making any saner. Hurley knew the look. Several of the Others were carrying guns in their hands, but in spite of the fact that Steve was sporting a gunshot wound in his thigh, they seemed reluctant to use them.

'Why?' Hurley wondered. 'They have us, it's done, why are they holding back? What do they want?'

He got his answer several seconds later as Jin and Claire crashed through the underbrush together. Both of them were leaving many small wounds across their faces and arms from the attacks of stray branches, and Aaron's terrified screaming was even louder than the building storm. Hurley watched as every single one of the Others' eyes was drawn to him like a beacon.

"Claire, get behind me!" he barked without thinking, not daring to take his eyes off of the Others long enough to do so much as glance at her as she scrambled to obey. 'They wanted them both,' he thought. 'They wanted to them both, but one was being guarded and the other was not, and now all of the leaders are gone andohshit.' As far as bad things went, Hurley didn't see how it could get much worse unless all of that thunder and lightning decided to come down from the sky and strike them dead on the spot. Hurley put his free hand back without thinking to shield Claire further.

"That's all we want!" a woman called out, wearing a face that adolescent acne or some disease that Hurley preferred not to think about had not been kind to. Scars large enough for him to put the pad of his thumb into littered her face. "Just the baby, that's all. Then we'll leave you alone."

Hurley shook his head with a determination that surprised even him and shifted the grip that he was maintaining on the axe. "Not going to happen, babe."

The eyes that stared out through all of those scars were more lucid than those of anyone else with her. That was not the most comforting thing that Hurley could have observed, especially not with what she said next. "We can control her. How long do you think that you'll last if we stop?"

"Control who?" Hurley blurted out before he could stop himself. Even if this was the worst possible place and time to pause for a chat, damn it, _somebody_ needed to start giving out the goods.

The woman grinned at him instead, slow and resigned, and shifted her gaze slightly to the left without answering. Hurley followed it… 'That is definitely not one of my people. Also, I'm pretty sure that I should not be able to see through her.'

Hurley was not sure that he would even be able to describe the woman to anyone five minutes later, so nondescript was she, except for the overwhelming impression of _green_, of growing things and tremendous, chaotic life. He did not think that he would ever be able to get the smell of freshly turned earth out of his nose. She grinned at them all, so wide that it nearly split her face. The green-eyed lady had a lot of teeth.

"That," the woman who seemed to be the Others' leader said. "You definitely want us to stay in control of that."

The lady grinned again, wide and hungry, and seemed to…to swell, was the only word that Hurley could even think of to describe it, and even that barely scratched the surface. She seemed to grow plumper and to liven, to become more real before their very eyes. "Yes," the lady said, closing her eyes with a blissful expression as every last drop of blood drained from the leader of the Others' face. "It was very wise of you to do that, while you could." She showed every single one of her teeth, so brilliant and so white.

A cloud fell across what was left of the moon as Hurley spun around to shield Claire, throwing them all into a temporary darkness that was as black as pitch and about as friendly. The last thing that he saw was the grin before he heard a series of screams.

A lot of screams, and shots that seemed be coming mainly from the Others. Hurley wrapped his arms around Claire, who was shaking so badly that Hurley thought she must be fighting back an urge to shriek as badly as Aaron. Though he was holding his breath and waiting for it, by some miracle the thud of bullets striking his or Claire's body never came. When the moon came back out, Hurley raised his head.

The woman had disappeared. The evidence of her presence, however, had not, and her teeth were not metaphorical. "Mother of God," Hurley breathed. He wondered what the hell Jack's group had done on the other side of the island that had turned that bitch loose and what they were going to have to do to put her back into her cage.

A low wail came from Sun, kneeling by Jin's side, and drew Hurley's attention back from the carnage that had been the Others. Not all of their panicked bullets had missed.

"Mother of God," Hurley repeated, releasing Claire at last. She continued to tremble violently; the rain was cold, but Hurley did not think that was all or even part of the reason. He hesitated a moment until he realized that Nina was already kneeling by Sun's side and pulling her back up before he left to gather in the wounded among their own people. That was leaders did, even ones who had no idea how they had gotten there.

End Part Seventeen


	18. Chapter 18

Part Eighteen

Jack first grunted and then moaned as he woke up again, his head feeling as if had swelled to at least twice its normal size. He could already sense fresh bruises forming from his shoulders all the way down to the backs of his knees. Jesus, Jack thought as dizzy bits of his own consciousness began to come back to him, he was lucky that he hadn't broken his back. He groaned again.

"Shh, shh," a feminine voice said above him, as hands that he knew traced patterns over his chest and face. "Jack, Jack, please, you have to be quiet and you have to get up."

Jack opened his eyes and blinked several times before he was able to bring Kate's face back into focus. He thought for certain that he had to be imagining the light that shone from behind Kate's face, making a corona out of her hair though it left her face in shadow.

Kate was no angel. There were lights, actual fluorescent lights, set into what looked like a mixture of thatch and raw earth about ten or twelve feet above the place where Kate was crouched beside him. "Oh, my God," Jack croaked. He tried to sit up, winced as his head and back scolded him for it, and decided that it would be a good idea to stay still for a few moments longer.

Kate snuck a quick glance over her shoulder at the artificial light, which was refusing to dissolve away like a good hallucination should. When she turned back to Jack, her expression was dazzled. "Yeah," she said, a little breathlessly. "I didn't believe it at first, either, but Locke and I jumped down after you when we saw you fall. No head trauma involved."

Staring directly in the light like that was beginning to make his eyes burn. Jack blinked and looked away. He had landed flat on his back on a floor that had once been made of rough-hewn wood but was now worn smooth by many feet traveling across it over the course of many years. The walls were packed dirt that looked as if they had been carved straight from the earth and designed strictly for the purposes of utility rather than aesthetics. The ragged ends of thatch that Jack could see handing down through the hole that he had fallen through looked dark and rotted, contributing to an overall air of a structure that might have once had its own rough majesty, but was now dying slowly.

Jack thought of Walt and the ease with which Ethan had infiltrated their camp. Dying slowly, maybe, but surely not going quietly.

"How long was I out?" Jack asked. Turning his head too quickly still made the world double and triple. Cautious exploration revealed a knot that was already the size of a robin's egg and growing quickly.

"Only a few minutes," Kate answered. She went behind him, put her hands beneath his arms, and began struggling to pull him to his feet. "Jack, we need to _go_-"

"Yes," Locke said, speaking for the first time. His face was pale and closer to worry than Jack had ever seen before. "It would be a good idea if we weren't still here when the Others realize that their castle is no longer secure." So he and Jack had looked around and immediately drawn the same conclusions about the place.

Jack pushed himself back up to his feet and then heard it: a faraway sounding of many feet and voices working in unison, coming closer. The rough hallway stretched out a seemingly interminable distance in either directions and had many other corridors branching off of it. The labyrinth picked up sounds and bounced them back and forth like playthings, so that Jack could not tell which direction they were coming from. Other than finding a way to go straight back up, moving anywhere at all seemed to be their best option at the moment.

Jack waved Kate off when she tried to put her shoulder beneath his and support some of his weight for him. "I'm all right, I'm fine." He ignored Kate's dubious expression as he noticed that she was walking with a slight limp. "Are you okay?"

Kate's expression went from dubious to flat-out incredulous. "_You're_ asking _me_ that?" When Jack only continued to stare at her, she shook her head and managed a faint smile. "I'm fine. Ankle just went wobbly for a minute when I jumped down after you." She patted at his arm and then turned to face Locke, her expression growing fearful as the sounds of approach grew louder. The walls were still playing havoc with sound, echoing and reechoing and, Jack hoped, making it sound like a much larger force was coming towards them than it actually was. "What should we do, John?" Locke, for all the urgency with which he had told them that they needed to leave moments before, was staring about the hallway with a look of awe and something else that Jack could not quite define.

No, he realized a moment later. Jack knew exactly what it was. A few more inches in the right direction, and he would have called it a look of recognition. "John?" Jack asked slowly. His instincts were screaming a message at him that he could not yet decipher wasn't sure what he would do about once he did. "See something you like there?"

Locke blinked, the expression of transcendence leaving his face between one second and the next. He looked almost like a man coming out of a religious experience. "Do you realize who long it must have taken to carve all of this out?" He gestured to the curving network of hallways all around them. "To thatch a roof, to make sure that it was structurally sound, to-" Locke paused and looked up at the fluorescent lights, which had a few moths beating listlessly against their plastic covers. Another small change that Jack could not decipher moved across his face. It did not soothe him any more than did the ones which had come before it. "To find a power source?"

"Does any of that really matter right now?" Jack asked. He glanced up at the hole through which he had fallen again, but they had no tools with which they could take the direct route and simply scramble up to safety. Meanwhile, his people were still trapped up there with the monster. _Sawyer_ was still up there with the monster.

Locke shook his head slowly, reluctantly. Jack thought that Locke was doing it more to appease him than anything else, for his eyes as they moved over the walls were still bright and eager to learn. "Probably not," he said, "but tropical islands are frequently centered over fault lines. They're built up on volcanoes." Locke reached out and touched one of the walls briefly, rubbing the dirt against his fingers. "Prone to earthquakes. I wonder what they knew, to make them think that it was safe to build beneath the ground like this?" A note of anger skimmed through Locke's voice for a second like a rock across the surface of a pond, gone again before Jack could even be sure that it had been real.

"Can we save the geology lesson for later?" When Kate was scared, really scared, there was a rough and almost dangerous quality that took over her voice, and it did not go away within a few seconds like Locke's anger had. Jack reached for her hand and squeezed it briefly. Kate's fingers spasmed around his for a moment before she pulled away.

Locke blinked, shivered again as if he had been on the verge of disappearing into some private world. Jack could not entirely take him to task for it, for there was a quality to the air itself here that made it seem thick and not quite real. Jack shivered himself and decided that all three of them must surely be on the verge of nervous breakdowns.

"Kate's right," Locke said. "Let's go." He began jogging down the hallway with the ease and grace of a man at least two decades younger and without glancing back once, though he was clearly slowing down to make allowances for both Kate's and Jack's injuries. Protestations that she was fine or not, Jack saw Kate continually sucking her lower lip between her teeth and biting down hard on it as she was forced to run on her bad ankle, and her face would go momentarily bloodless each time. Jack could not really pause to argue with her about it, for the world was still going lopsided on him at odd moments, causing him to wobble each time and Kate to sneak him feminine versions of the exact same look that he suspected he was giving her from beneath his lashes.

The sounds of people were fading behind, clustering together as they likely found the place were Jack had made his graceful entry into the Others' world, when Locke said abruptly, "Here." He stopped and pointed to a door of the same rough wood that made up the floor, blocking another hole that had been cut straight out of the earth. The hinges were sinew wrapped around a bamboo pole of the same sort that they used as framework for their shelters back on the beach, causing the entire door to sag alarmingly. There was no handle, only a patch worn smooth in roughly the same size and shape as a hand to mark where people had been opening it. Jack wondered how many years this place had to have been in use in order to acquire these signs of wear. At least sixteen, he decided, thinking of Danielle Rousseau and her broken mind. If Locke was right, then probably a lot longer than that.

There was a green glow creeping along the edges of the door, startling against the black. Jack very much doubted that they were looking at the reflection from an exit light. He opened his mouth to say so, but Locke had already opened the door and slid inside before the first syllable could even exit Jack's mouth. Kate barely hesitated for a second before she followed. Jack muttered an oath beneath his breath, looked quickly over his shoulder, and made sure that the door shut behind him as he entered the room.

"Oh, my God," Jack found himself saying for the second time in under thirty minutes as his eyes tried to adjust to the relative shadow again after becoming so accustomed to the bright artificial lights outside. There was a single fluorescent long-bulb set into the ceiling here, but it was so close to burning out and flickering so rapidly that it almost seemed to be a strobe, more useful for atmosphere than for illumination. What light it did cast down was primarily centered on a crude wooden table upon which was scattered a variety of tools and small mechanical things that Jack did not recognize. A part of Jack's brain wanted to drift closer to the table and examine the things on it at his leisure, but a large part, a dominant part, was still in awe and struggling to catch up.

Upon first entering the room Jack's impression had been one of a small workshop, scarcely large enough for the table of curiosities and perhaps three or four people to stand around it. As his eyes adjusted further, he rapidly realized how wrong he had been. The blow that he had seen along the edges of the door was in fact the cumulative effect of a series of hundreds in not thousands of tiny green lights set into rows on the oldest and largest computer than Jack had ever seen. What he had at first assumed to be the room's back wall had really only been the computer's face, and what he had thought was a tiny workroom snugged out of the way where it wouldn't bother anyone was in fact a cavern.

He started closer to the computer so that he could examine it more closely, stopped only when he heard Kate calling his name. She was lingering by the table instead, picking up tools that Jack could not begin to recognize one by one and examining them for a few seconds each before she set them back down and moved on. Hands trembling so badly that it was visible to Jack even from a distance of several feet, Kate reached out and picked up of the small pieces of metal that lay scattered among the tools. "I think you need to see this."

Though Locke was already kneeling eagerly to examine the behemoth computer at a closer level and Jack cast a longing look over his shoulder towards doing the same, he walked over to see what Kate was holding. "What is it?"

Though her hands were still trembling so badly that it was a wonder she didn't drop the object and lose it among the dust and dirt of a floor that had not seen the loving touch of a broom for a very long time and there was not a spare drop of blood left in her face, Kate's voice was hard and cold. "Is this one of the things that Sawyer described to you?"

Jack had not been aware that anyone had realized that Sawyer had told him about the monster before he had told the group at large. He looked at Kate hard, but her face was giving away nothing and Locke for the moment at least did not seem to be paying any attention. Jack came even closer, until he was directly beneath the light. The mechanical thing that Kate was holding in her hands was smooth and cylindrical, with rows of serrated blades on each end that could function as propellers or teeth depending on what the situation demanded. It was larger than her thumb, but Jack could see why Sawyer had judged his own to be a fairly accurate measurement. "Looks like."

"Oh. So this is what killed the pilot." Kate set the tiny monster down on the table and regarded it solemnly for a long moment before she picked up one of the tools and flipped it around in her hand so that she could, just as solemnly, bring the handle of it down on the machine with all of the strength that she had. Bits of metal flew in all directions and they both flinched back for a moment, shielding their eyes. Jack watched impassively as Kate collected all of the other little robots into a pile and repeated the process on them one by one, until the table was littered with scrap. A few of them buzzed to life and tried to skitter away in an eerie pantomime of intelligence. Kate calmly gathered them back up again, wincing and swearing when one or two tried to bite her, until there was nothing left moving on the table.

"Good," Jack said when it was done, before he went back to check on what Locke was doing.

Locke was kneeling by a box set down in front of the computer on the floor, flicking through hundreds of what Jack at first thought were filing cards and a few seconds later realized were in fact rectangles of heavy paper, almost cardboard, with dozens upon dozens of tiny notches cut into each one like a code.

"The first computer was built in 1947," Locke said without looking up when he heard Jack approaching behind him. "It filled up a whole room, and yet it was not even as powerful as a child's video game." Locke paused long enough to look up at the fluorescent light that still glowed above the table. The much stronger lights in the hallway crept in around the edges of the door. "Think this one's a little more powerful than that, but it's probably just as old."

"Just a little," Jack echoed, staring up at the lights himself. He turned back to Locke and nudged at the box of cards that Locke was paging through, struggling to remember all of the facts about old computers that he could from movies and television. "Isn't someone supposed to be feeding these things into there?"

"Supposed to be." Locke threw the cards that he had been looking at back into the box; a cloud of dust rose up. The angry expression did not dissolve away from his face within a few seconds this time.

Kate had finished up her destruction at the table and, slipping one or two of the heavier tools into her pack, crept back over to the door. She tilted her head to one side for a moment and listened hard for a moment before signaling to them that it was all clear. Jack shook his head at her to wait for a moment longer, and a frustrated look crossed her face.

Claire had several days of her life missing. Scott was dead. Walt was missing, Sayid, Shannon, and several of their other people were missing, and Sawyer had been shot twice. So far as Jack could see, he didn't have one good reason to be lenient or otherwise play nice with them. He backed up a step and took a long, long look at the computer, with its rows of lights like eyes. In the gloom and the shadow, it was very easy to believe in a thinking machine.

"Did you see Sawyer, Charlie, or Michael before you came in after me?" Jack turned long enough to ask Kate.

She shook her head, her eyes dark and worried. "We barely saw you fall. You were alone."

The Others had unleashed a monster that could at this very moment be killing people, one person in particular, that Jack would move the earth itself in order to protect. He took a step back.

"Is this their power source?" Jack asked Locke.

Locke stood and brushed the dust from his hands. His eyes were every bit as dark as Kate's and even more unreadable. "Doubt it," he said. "Even if they were somehow able to rig up a system of batteries, the sheer amount needed to keep all of these lights on all the time…" Locke exhaled slowly. His shoulders had been growing steadily more tense over the past several moments, Jack realized, until he hardly looked like the same man any longer. "I've seen a computer like this before, Jack. I was a boy. It's been here for decades."

"Fine." Jack circled back towards the table and picked up a wrench that Kate had left behind. It was much too large to have possibly been on any use on the maintenance and repair of the Others' cloud of monsters, but Jack had a slightly different use in mind for it. He hefted it in his hand to get a feel for it as he returned to the computer, reared back, and swung.

The lights broke first, with a satisfying sound of shattering glass. Jack paused only long enough to back away and shield his eyes from flying shards before he came back and swung again. The metal face on the computer dented inward with a tremendous banging sound as wisps of smoke began to curl out form beneath the dented metal.

"Jack!" Kate hissed when she heard the sound begin to echo and reecho about the room, throwing a wide-eyed look towards the door. Locke's eyes, though, were gleaming with something that was either anger or triumph. Possibly it was even pride. He went to the table behind Jack without a word, selected a tool, and came back to make his own contribution to the Others and their way of life. The sound was enormous, but Jack did not care, because none of the lights on that damned thing were still shining when he was done.

Kate stayed by the door, not even maintaining the pretense that she was listening for the Others' approach any longer. Had she had the option of committing them both to an asylum right then, Jack thought that she might have taken it.

Breathing heavily, Jack tossed the wrench back down on the table and paused to survey the damage that he had done. Even if it could be repaired, it would be days or weeks of work before those lights began blinking again. Jack flashed a tight, gleaming smile at Locke, who was looking at him with something very much like approval.

"That felt good," Jack said, flexing his fingers to work out the cramps that had developed there during his rampage.

The light above the table flickered once, twice, and then went out abruptly, plunging the room into a total darkness. Even the glow around the doorway was cut off, as all of the florescent lights in the hallway followed suit only a second later. Jack did not need to see Locke's face to know that he was smiling as he said, "Oh, yes, that was a very good thing."

Kate's disembodied voice was the only one that didn't sound pleased as she said, "If that computer kept everything organized, then the Others will know that we did something here. We're not safe."

They had not been safe since the second that they had tumbled down this rabbit hole and for a long time before that, Jack thought but did not say. Kate was right. Something about the air here even felt different, thicker and more pregnant, as if there was some kind of current running through the air and only waiting for a spark to set it off. It made Jack feel as if there was a faint coating of slime over his skin, and he didn't like it. He liked it even less for the fact that he could not come up with any rational explanation for it or for the set of nerves that it was causing.

"So let's find out if Walt's here and then get the hell out," Jack said rather than dwelling on it. He moved past Kate's form in the dark and reached for the door, already fumbling about in his pack for a flashlight.

In the end, he didn't need it. Though every single one of the lights in the corridor had been put out by the death of the computer, it was still lit as brightly as the day. Jack took an instinctive step back, throwing his arms up over his eyes to protect them, lowering them a second later when he realized that there was a girl.

It took Jack a moment to discover that she was not an Other, for she made no hostile move towards any of them, and that she was carrying no torch or flashlight that could explain the brilliant illumination that had blinded Jack upon first catching sight of her. A beat after that, and he realized that he could see every detail of the dirt wall behind the girl straight through her body.

There were no chairs in the room, which was a shame. Jack suddenly needed to sit down very badly.

The girl-the woman-Jack could not really tell, for she had an odd ageless quality that made even the most tentative guesses seem suspect. The long, dark hair that fell past her shoulders was the only thing that made Jack realize that she was not in fact an albino, for her skin was the color of new porcelain and her eyes were an eerie, bleached-sky blue.

And the fact that he _could see through her_. Jack's mind kept circling back, trying to process that into a rational worldview, and retreating into a shocked silence when it could not.

"_Yes_," the girl said, looking past them and into the room, where the broken computer still smoked. If there had been any force in the world strong enough to make Jack regret that action, it would have been the note of pure and savage triumph that colored her voice.

The girl turned slowly to regard them all; they could see one another's faces clearly by her reflected light. Locke in particular she paid special attention to, drawing her lips back and sneering, "You can't stop me and she can't stop me. I'm going to get mine back."

"It's not possible," Locke told her in response. "Even for you. And besides the fact that you can't, more to the point, you _shouldn't_."

Two very different emotions ran across the girl's face, as if a toddler and an adult woman were battling for control of the same territory. Jack thought that she might be on the verge of bursting into tears, if in fact that it turned out that… 'Oh, God, just say it.' That ghosts were capable of crying.

"I didn't deserve it!" she shrieked at Locke, her voice cracking and her hands clenching themselves into fists. Yes, ghosts could cry, if one ignored the fact that the tears dropped away into nothing as soon as they rolled off the edge of her chin. "I didn't deserve what they did to me, but she _does_. She's terrible, and you know that she's terrible, and if she gets to choose a knight for her side then so do I!"

Locke's face cleared when she said 'knight', and he made a soft 'Ah' sound as if he was finally receiving confirmation of something that he had suspected for a long time. The girl had grown more substantial in the meanwhile, until Jack could now only see hazy details of the wall behind her. He could not shake the feeling that this was a very bad thing. "Her end is nature," Locke went on, very, very gently. "Yours is abomination." As gentle as his voice was, he could have been telling a child that their grandmother had just died.

The girl bared her teeth at them all, so broadly and in such a powerful fit of emotion that she hardly seemed human. "_Watch_," she said with a terrible satisfaction, and was gone. She didn't walk off down the hallway, she did not fade away, she was _gone_, plunging the corridor into a darkness that seemed even thicker than the one that had reigned before her arrival.

Sitting down seemed like a better idea by the second. Jack staggered back until he felt the earthen wall supporting him at his spine and began fumbling through his pack for the flashlight again. He could hear Kate panting harshly from a few feet away. Only Locke seemed unruffled by what had just happened.

Yeah, Jack meant to ask him a few questions about that.

He found the flashlight in his pack at long last and flicked it on, spinning the light immediately and shining it into Locke's face. Locke squinted and turned away, putting his hand up to prevent himself from being blinded. "You think that's a good idea, Jack?" he asked mildly.

Jack could think of several reasons why holding the only point of light in a place filled with their enemies might not be a brilliant plan, but right at the moment he did not care. Lowering the light by an inch or two, he demanded, "How did that-" His throat closed up around the words and refused to allow them out. "How does she know you?"

Locke gave him an infuriating, steady stare. "I've been telling you for weeks that we're not in a normal place, Jack. About time you started listening to me."

Jack curled his hand into a fist and, before he even realized what he was doing, had punched Locke squarely in the mouth. Kate called his name sharply and jumped forward to grab at his arm, pulling him back before he could punch Locke again. Jack panted harshly, realizing how very badly he wanted to, so badly that his hand had already curled itself back into a first and it was a struggle to uncurl it again. If not Locke then he wanted to at least hit _something_, anything, so that he could pound his fists against something and demand that the world be forced to make sense again.

"Ghosts?" Jack said finally, almost choking on the word. "Your idea of a strange island where there are _ghosts_? That's not-"

"Rational?" Locke finished for him. "That doesn't make sense?" He sounded angry again; no, furious. He stabbed his finger at the place where the girl had been only seconds before. "You saw it for yourself, Jack." He turned his head and spat quickly to one side. Blood glittered for a moment before being swallowed by the dirt. Though Jack could not be sure, he thought he felt the ground beneath him tremble. "You just walked out of a workshop where technology from first years in the past is sitting side by side with technology that shouldn't exist for another fifty, and you want to talk about things that don't make sense? How many times have unexplained events happened to us since we've crashed, Jack, things that we don't talk about because talking about them is too hard?"

It would be so much easier to punch Locke again if he was not making a twisted kind of sense there. Jack backed off a step, still breathing hard. He would have loved to find a chair to sink into, because before too much more time went by it was not going to be a matter of choice. "And you've been talking to that thing since the beginning."

"Not her." There were some things that Jack was just going to gloss over, purely for the sake of his own sanity. He could have himself a nice little breakdown later. Locke's eyes glittered for a moment before he said, "And while you're so interested in yelling at me right now, haven't you wondered about Sawyer's dreams lately?"

'I'll tell you as soon as I've figured it out myself.' Jack felt all of the blood drain from his face and head for parts unknown, and he would have lunged forward again and physically put himself between them. "So I guess it really comes down to how much faith you have in Sawyer, doesn't it?"

Sawyer who was still keeping secrets from him, Sawyer who might be in league with something the likes of which Jack did not even want to think about, Sawyer who had painfully few bright spots in a history of looking out solely for himself. Jack exhaled a long stream of air through his nose and, rather than answering Locke directly, said, "You said that the computer was not the source."

"I did." There was a loud popping sound, as if they were all in an airplane-again-and all of their eardrums had blown at once. Jack blinked and swore that he saw a ripple travel through the air, blowing all of their hair back. He decided to push it to the back of his mind, to the place where there was already a long list of things waiting for when his sanity was better equipped to deal with them. "But I don't think that's going to be an issue."

A finger of foreboding ran down Jack's spine. 'How much faith do you have in Sawyer?' It became an echo. 'How much faith do you have?' Jack grit his teeth until his jaw ached.

A breeze traveled down the hallway to them, bringing with it the smell of the sea.

End Part Eighteen


	19. Chapter 19

Part Nineteen

Shannon was not a hero. She allowed the mantra into her head once and could not get it out again, no matter how hard she tried. Over and over, on endless loop, until Shannon thought that it would only be a few more minutes until she screamed. As soon as she began that, she knew, there was a good chance that she wouldn't stop.

'Not very heroic there, girl,' Shannon thought bleakly. Granted, if there was anyone on the island who had an excuse to start screaming right about then, it was she. Her finer had stopped throbbing hours ago and had descended into a slow, sullen ache instead, but it was already turning black and blue with new bruises. The hand itself was swollen and nearly impossible to use, even if she had been able to come up with anything that resembled an escape plan. Shannon's head was still ringing and her thoughts were coming to her sluggishly after someone had put their rifle butt into her temple with a skill and zest suggesting that it was not the first time that they had done something similar. Shannon's lower lip felt fat and swollen, and there was a crust of dried blood on it from the split running straight down the middle. Shannon was pretty sure that she had been punched in the mouth as she was hauled from the water; there were several spots missing from her memory, like turpentine splattered across a painting. She wasn't even sure of where she was right now.

Meanwhile, Sayid had not woken up at all. Shannon guessed that she didn't have to be Jack to know that this was not a good thing. She crouched by Sayid's side, shivering even though the small room that they had been thrown into and summarily ignored was quite warm, and splayed her good hand across his face as if she could wake him up just by touching him and then wishing for it hard enough.

Sayid's breath was warm and steady against Shannon's palm. That was good, right? That was a good sign? Probably not good enough to offset the enormous lump that had arisen on Sayid's own temple or the blood that was thickly caking his cheek and neck and definitely not good enough to make up for their not having a crateful of weapons and companions who knew how to use them, but at this point she would take what she could get.

Shannon shivered again. She didn't know why the Others-she was sure that that was what these people who had only a passing acquaintance with soap were-had left them alive at this point. When she had to stop and ponder something like that, that was when she knew that their situation was, to put it delicately, roughly eight different kinds of fucked up.

"Sayid?" Shannon leaned over Sayid's face and whispered urgently to him, as she had been doing at regular intervals ever since she had woken up herself. In between these moments she would get up, go over to the door, and discover that, yep, it was still made of thick wood and, yep, it was still going to laugh at her every time that she tried to force it open by throwing her shoulder up against it. She had enough bruises as it was, thanks. "Sayid, Sayid, Sayid, please, if you want to hop up and bust out some soldier mojo then I can't think of a better time."

Sayid shifted and muttered something beneath his breath, but his eyes did not open. It was more than Shannon had gotten on any of her previous attempts, but she sank back against the wall all the same, feeling hysteria as it pressed close and threatened to eat her up in one gulp. The temptation to put her good hand over her eyes, lower her head, and just cry was very strong. Had Shannon been the sort to go into hysterics without a huge load of provocation first-even if this counted-then the whole mess probably would have been over right then and there.

Shannon pulled her knees up her chest, rested her head on top of them, and cried quietly for several minutes. She raised her head as soon as she felt calmer, sighing and swiping at the tear tracks with her good hands. Her bad one began throbbing again in spite of her best efforts to keep it still and not even breathe on it unless she had to, as if it was upset by being left out of all the fun. It hurt badly enough that Shannon had to cry all over again. She sniffled to a stop once her finger finally stopped trying to prove a point and had fallen back into a dull ache. It didn't feel quite as good as it had the first time around.

So she wasn't a hero. That wasn't so bad, Shannon reasoned. She was a pretty good bitch, and in a situation like this she figured that it probably came down to one and the same once everything had been said and done. Shannon sent up a brief prayer asking that Sayid didn't have any internal injuries and she wasn't about to, like, send his spleen out through his nose or something before she leaned over and shook him again. "Okay, Sayid? I…like you a whole, whole lot, but you need to wake up and you need to do it right the hell now, all right? 'Cause even if we're both in over our heads, at least you're closer to the surface than I am."

Sayid muttered again, but that was it. Shannon swore violently and would have stomped her foot against the ground if she had not already been sitting. She was still very tempted to do it, anyway, and was only stopped by the fear that moving too quickly would jar her hand again.

She settled instead for throwing a poisonous glare up at the room's single light, one of the long florescent jobs that made supermarkets and public schools such depressing places to spend any amount of time in. It flickered every few seconds, as if it wasn't any happier to be there than Shannon was. Shannon didn't see what it was even drawing power from in the first place, since as far as she could tell the room was really just a glorified alcove carved from the dirt, but that was fine. It wasn't as if she didn't' have any other things to worry about.

Shannon pushed herself back up to her feet and crossed the few yards back over to the door, even though she already knew what she would find from the last twenty or thirty times that she had done so. She couldn't call herself a bitch unless she wanted to be a stubborn bitch, too. It was a heavy wooden door, thick enough that she couldn't force it open and that the Others were apparently confident that Sayid would not be able to force it, either, set on a long wooden pole and hinges made of ancient rawhide. Shannon had thought about seeing if she couldn't cut the hinges and get out that way, but both her pack and Sayid's own had been taken from them at some point while she was unconscious, and any knives that Sayid might have brought with him had gone with them. Shannon had spent close to an hour picking at them with her fingernails all the same before she had given up in disgust. The Others might be creepy, murderous bastards with hygiene that shot straight into territory so nasty that Shannon could not see how they stood to be around each other, but they had the island and its resources bent utterly to their will.

Shannon gave the hinges another experimental tug before she blew a frustrated breath out between her teeth and slammed her fist against the door. Pain echoed all the way up into her shoulder and the skin over her knuckles split; it was still all that she could do not to hit the door again. A good tantrum beat a good cry any day of the week.

"Shannon?"

Shannon's heart leapt into her throat at the sound of her name being called and she spun around, almost thinking that she had gone crazy in the silence and was now only imagining things. When she saw Sayid's warm brown eyes looking back at her, her knees buckled for a second in relief.

"Hey," Shannon said, abandoning the door and crossing back over to kneel by Sayid's side. He pushed himself up onto his elbows first and then used the earthen wall at his back to rise to a full sitting position. From the many grimaces and small sounds of pain that Sayid was making, it was not a fun process. "Um, should you be moving? You could have internal bleeding or something." Shannon made no attempt to hide the naked worry that colored her voice and made it tremble.

Sayid tried to smile for her as he got himself settled back into a more comfortable position. "I have experienced worse," he assured her.

While Shannon had no doubt that Sayid meant it as a comfort, he missed the mark by a wide margin. She went and sat down beside him against the wall, snuggling as close as she was able without hurting either of them. Just their luck, Shannon thought, every time that they tried to go on a date it just all went to hell. She thought that she might laugh and instead wound up pressing the back of her hand quickly to her mouth in order to wrestle back an urge to be sick. Seeing Sayid's look, Shannon quickly shook her head.

Sayid touched at his cheek, made note of the amount of blood there, and asked, "How long was I unconscious?"

"I don't know," Shannon confessed. "I don't know how long I was out myself." She held out her wrists for Sayid to view, both of which were free of any kind of watch. "I think it's been a few hours since I woke up, though. They hit you a lot harder than they did me."

"I tried to protect you," Sayid said slowly. He raised his voice on the final word, as if he was not sure that the memory was real and wanted Shannon to confirm it for him.

Shannon was happy to do so. "When they were trying to get us out of the water. It was sweet." She tried to smile, so happy was she to have another person to talk to and so relieved that Sayid was awake and by all available evidence still in possession of a brain that had not been beaten smooshy.

Sayid's expression changed subtly when Shannon smiled. Embarrassed, she ducked her head and put her hand back over her mouth. "I look like a mess, don't I?"

Sayid pulled her hand down so that he could run his thumb over her lower lip, so lightly that she scarcely felt it at all. "You look wonderful and brave."

Oh, but she had found herself a man who knew how to talk to a lady. Even though he hadn't gone anywhere near directly denying the crapitude of her appearance, Shannon caught herself ducking her head and blushing. "You look like you came out of the wrong side of a bar brawl," she said, letting herself smile fully. "Did I mention that I like men who fight for me?"

Sayid put his arm around her shoulders so that he could stroke her hair through his fingers. They passed several moments in worried silence before he asked, "Has anyone spoken to you since you were brought here?"

"No," Shannon answered. "I woke up in here all by myself, and no one ahs so much as peeked in the door since then." She paused. "Is that a good thing or a bad one?"

Sayid paused long enough to make Shannon's stomach clench itself into an even tighter knot before he answered heavily, "It means that we're either so important that the Others are retreating to think about us and decide how to proceed, or we rank of such little importance that we have already been forgotten. Neither one of those is a good option."

Shannon felt cold all over. She nestled herself even further into Sayid's side and felt his arm tighten about her shoulders in return. "Yay," she said in a small voice. "I'm having more fun by the minute."

The single light flickered once, and then went out with no further warning whatsoever. The room was plunged into a pure and perfect blackness. Shannon let a few shocked seconds go by before she said, "I pissed off fate by doing that, didn't I?" When Sayid did not answer, Shannon went on, "Maybe their light bulb just burned out."

"No." Sayid's voice had gone cold and hard. "Look at the outlines of the door." Shannon tried to focus on the place where she had last seen the door, but all that she could detect was darkness. "There were lights out there a few moments ago. They shined beneath the door."

"Oh," Shannon said in an even smaller voice. She cleared her throat. "So the bad guys are having trouble with their fuse box. Can't say that I'm just eaten up with sympathy."

"Perhaps." Sayid still sounded dubious. Shannon heard as he tried to get to his feet beside her, only to slide back down with a quickly drawn hiss of pain.

"I'll check," Shannon said. She stood.

"Shannon, perhaps you should not-" Sayid began.

"One of us can stand up," Shannon responded tartly. "One of us can't. Don't have to be a crazy math genius to figure that one out." She made her way across the few yards to the door mostly by touch, stopping when her fingers touched the rough wood. She pressed her ear against the door and listened hard, but could hear nothing from the hallway. "Maybe it's just nap time." Shannon started to turn back.

There was a loud 'whump' sound in the air, like a sonic boom in miniature, that made Shannon jump back from the door and issue a brief, startled scream. It wasn't so miniature that it didn't still make the walls of the room tremble and send clods of dirt falling down into Shannon's hair from the ceiling. She yelped again and wasted no time in quickly brushing them out. Would anyone even bother trying to rescue them if the roof fell down and buried them both? If the way that they had been treated so far was any kind of indicator, then Shannon doubted it.

Barely ten seconds went by after the sound before the air…Shannon did not want to say that it moved, because that implied that there was a wind. It _pulsed_, becoming thick and almost alive for a second before the sensation faded.

Shannon found herself blinking several times in quick succession, as if she had been dazzled by a bright light even though the darkness had remained unbroken throughout. "So maybe not nap time," she said in a shaky voice, drifting close to the door again.

"Shannon, get back!" Sayid commanded suddenly in a ringing voice that Shannon had never heard before. She would have told him without hesitation that being the former soldier boy, all around badass, whatever, did _not_ give him an excuse to start ordering her around now, were it not for that tone.

Shannon took a few steps back from the door and saw what Sayid saw. Curling in through the cracks along the top, bottom, and sides, growing stronger by the second, where there had only been darkness before there was now a sterile, bleached light.

Shannon back up even further, until she stumbled over Sayid's legs and only by the grace of quick reflexes managed to stop herself from a fall. She put her good hand tightly over her mouth as the urge to scream began rising again. They had nowhere to run to.

The door flew open, and Shannon raised her arm automatically to shield her eyes from what she was sure would be a tremendous light. It wasn't.

"Walt?" Shannon asked, lowering her arm and wondering if she wasn't imagining things, if she wasn't really standing in darkness and only thinking that there was a boy in front of her.

Walt fumbled quickly and then turned on a flashlight that he had picked up from God only knew where, replacing whatever it was that Shannon had thought she saw with a light that was far more normal and less likely to make Shannon wonder if she had gone right out of her mind without realizing it. The batteries were on the verge of going out, so that the light bounced across the crags in the walls and drew even more shadows than it would have ordinarily.

"Walt?" Shannon repeated when she got no answer from him, taking a few steps closer. Walt's eyes were wide and wild and he was trembling all over, making the flashlight jiggle. His arms were bleeding from several puncture wounds that looked too large to have come from something as mundane as a hypodermic needle. Shannon winced in automatic sympathy. "Are you all right, sweetie?" The endearment felt strange in her mouth and sounded even stranger on the air. 'Gave me his dog.'

Walt's shaking, if anything, grew even more pronounced. "They're going to be mad when they find out that I left," he said. He sounded as if he was talking to himself as much as he was them. "I'm supposed to be doing a job, but we need to leave now."

Even if Shannon only understood one word out of every three in the first sentence, the last one wasn't going to get any argument from her. "Train that flashlight over her so that I can see," she said, turning without waiting to see if Walt was going to do as she asked. Sayid was struggling to his feet, using the wall at his back as a brace, but he was still listing visibly from side to side. Shannon noticed that he could not take his eyes away from Walt for more than a second at a time. So they were on the same page, then; even in keeping her back turned to him for the moment that it took to walk across the room, Shannon could feel the skin between her shoulder blades begin to tingle and itch.

"He did not turn that flashlight on for nearly a minute after the door opened," Sayid said in a low voice as Shannon knelt to put her shoulder beneath his arm and help him to his feet. She yelped softly as her bad hand was bent at an angle that it did not particularly care for.

Shannon waited for her head to stop swimming before she answered. "You really want to pause and debate that too hard, or you just want to get somewhere where there are more torches and fewer beatings?"

Sayid struggled back to his feet, waving Shannon off when she tried to help him. He remained still for several seconds with his eyes closed until he was sure that he was going to remain upright before he nodded. "Walt, do you know the way out of here?"

Walt nodded slowly. His eyes were grave and distant. "I know everything about this place," he said.

Shannon could catalogue all of the ways that her heart broke to hear Walt saying that sentence in that tone of voice, or she could do her part in getting them out of there. She put her shoulder beneath Sayid's again, ignoring the slight face that he made at her. They could have that conversation at some point when she was not the only thing keeping Sayid on his feet. "We'll need you to lead us out," she said to Walt.

Walt nodded, his gaze still focused on some place far away from them, and turned to go. Shannon did not like that look at all. She reached out before she could stop herself and hugged Walt to her for a moment before she let him go. Walt tolerated the touch for a moment before he walked off, sweeping the flashlight in front on him in wide circles. He seemed to know what he was doing. Shannon was pretty sure that everyone involved, Walt included, would be much happier if he didn't.

They had barely gone one hundred yards in the dark before Shannon began to hear the dim, echoing sound of at least two separate voices. Call her crazy, but she was pretty sure that that was not a good thing to be heading towards, rather than turning and running like hell in the opposite direction. "Walt!" she hissed. He kept walking as if she had said nothing at all. Shannon threw a quick look at Sayid. So they could follow him, or they could go with Plan B, the one that involved running like rabbits that had gotten lost in the warren. Neither of those options was really working for her. "Walt!" Shannon called again, raising her voice a bit louder. The beginnings of an echo started to bounce off the walls, and Shannon winced.

Walt paused long enough to look back at them. "It's fine," he said, a little of the deadness leaving his eyes. Shannon was glad to see it go. She thought that his step even hitched for a moment, as if he was struggling not to break into a run.

Shannon and Sayid exchanged another look. "The dog," Shannon said finally, as if that explained everything. She was trusted with something, for the first time in a very long time. The least that she could do was turn that same courtesy towards its owner. Without waiting to see if Sayid was even going to argue, Shannon followed after Walt as he disappeared around a bend in the corridor. Besides, if the kid had been a little off before, then the few things that Shannon had seen of him since then suggested that he was a lot off now.

Shannon rounded the bend just in time to hear Walt give a yelp of pure joy and rush straight into the arms of his father, who was looking even more haggard and worn out than he had the last time that Shannon had seen him. Michael and Charlie had been supporting an even worse-looking Sawyer between them, but Michael did not even glance in Sawyer's direction before he was rushing forward himself. Sawyer and Charlie both swore and flashed Michael identical looks that would have been funny in any other place and at any other time.

"Dad!" Walt yelped, hurling himself into Michael's arms with a force that nearly bowled them both over. He sounded as if he was on the verge of tears. If Shannon tried to speak then, she was pretty sure that she would have sounded the same.

Michael dropped to one knee so that he could gather Walt to him, running his hands up and down his son's back as if he needed something to convince himself of Walt's very reality. "My boy, my boy, my boy," he whispered over and over again. Okay, so Shannon wasn't going to be in tears only if she tried to speak. A quick glance around confirmed that she was not the only one.

They all appeared moved saved for Sawyer, who looked as if he had just been struck in the back of the head with a board. He stared slowly around the hallway as if he was seeing it for the very first time or worse, that he wasn't. "Guys," he said in a low voice, "think the touching reunion can wait until we've made it back topside, all right?" His eyes were wild, closer to panic than Shannon thought she had ever seen before.

The flashlight that Walt was still holding in his hand began to shake even hard as Walt's trembling increased, as the sounds of approach echoed like distant drums.

End Part Nineteen


	20. Chapter 20

Part Twenty

Sawyer paused and watched as the doc ran ahead of him in the dark. That was not the way that he was meant to go. Sawyer did not know where this information came from, except that it pissed him off, and he was obeying it, and that pissed him off more. It was just long enough to get this mess done, Sawyer promised himself, just long enough to 'give one back', whatever the hell that meant. Sawyer could pretend to play by the rules when it suited him. More than fifteen years of his life was wrapped up in acting like he wasn't angling for a peek at the cards of everyone else at the poker table, after all.

But the real beauty of that, the kicker of that, was that he made it his business know the hands of everyone else even before they did. And even if Sawyer was in an in-between place now where he didn't know which ground was safe to step on, the skill set remained. It wouldn't take a whole hell of a lot to make the ends justify the means.

'Mark my words, bitch,' Sawyer thought, not so much choosing to stop as it was that his ribs ordered him to. He didn't know if Dream Date would hear him as he had been able to hear her back at the caves, frankly at this point did not care. Let her stew over it. If there was one thing that she ought to know about him, since she knew so damn-fired much else, it ought to be that he kept his promises. 'You just wait until we get this turned around and I wind up on top again.'

Jack did not realize that Sawyer was not behind him any longer and raced off into the darkness, hell-bent on being the hero and saving the day. The funny thing about Jack was that the more Sawyer learned about him, the more he realized that Jack would more often than not make it work.

Sawyer doubled over as soon as Jack was gone from his sight, bracing his good arm across his knees to keep himself from falling over completely and putting his hand against his side as his ribs screamed and the wound burned. The smell of motor oil, of moss and the sharp ozone smell of coming rain was thick in his nose. The buzzing sound was louder than ever, but with the thick clouds obscuring the moon Sawyer could not see which way it was coming from. He crouched low to the ground and felt his lips drawing back in a primitive warding-off gesture.

"Hope you got a plan, Dream Date," Sawyer growled to the air. "Sure can't finish your little mission if I'm in Kibbles and Bits." Always let them think that they were in control. Yeah, he knew how to play this game. It would help more if he knew how he expected Dream Date to actually interfere on his behalf, but he would take what he could get at this point.

The sky that had been issuing sullen threats all afternoon finally made good on its promise, opening up between one second and the next and dropping down a heavy curtain of rain. It was thick enough to count as a physical blow, and it was glorious. The buzzing sound changed pitch, becoming high-pitched, almost frantic. The smell of motor oil began to dissipate, replaced instead by the smell of living.

Sawyer flicked his hair back from his forehead and shivered, already soaked to the skin even though the rain had begun less than ten seconds before. "Okay," he allowed as the sound of the monster began to dwindle away. "Don't know how you pulled that one off, but I ain't going to complain about it." He straightened, waited until his broken ribs had finished consulting among themselves and decided that carrying him a little farther was not such a bad idea before he moved forward. Man with a mission, that was him. Sawyer turned away, rain running into his eyes so heavily that it was a wonder that he could see even six inches in front of his face, let alone far enough to warn him of any approaching threat.

Which made the fact that he could see _her_ all the more startling.

One second, the air before his eyes was clear, and in the next a pair of eyes vividly, olively green were staring back at him. "You're not mine," the woman who happened to be attached to those eyes said coldly, which suited Sawyer just fine. He didn't _want_ to be this lady's one and only, not with the way that the air crackled and trembled just by being within a six foot range of her. She made Dream Date look like a house cat batting at a tiger's nose, Sawyer thought in the endless second before he moved and it all went to hell, and he wondered who would ever be crazy enough to sign on the dotted line and make themselves this queen's knight when he was still questioning his sanity for the small amount that he had committed to so far.

"Damn right, sugar," Sawyer said, taking a small step backwards. Just call him Haley Joel, because he was talking to ghosts all over the place. Wasn't atonement just the best roller coaster ride ever. "And you'd best turn right around if you want to go applying the strong arm tactics, because I only have one good one at the moment and someone else is wrenching pretty hard at it as is."

Passion's Lady curled her lip for a second at the mention, however oblique, of Dream Date before she flashed him a bright grin. Sawyer really wished that she would put those teeth away. Sharp as they were, they were making him think that the Big Bad Wolf had gone and gotten himself a sex change operation and a pretty pair of contacts.

"You're not mine," the green-eyed woman repeated, sounding more like she was musing to herself than actually talking to him. "But you'll do." She reached out and caressed Sawyer's cheek.

Her hand went right through the skin, and oh, if that was not enough to drive Sawyer right out of his mind then and there then he figured that he was bulletproof. It was I hot /I , hot like an iron being applied to his skin. Sawyer yelled in shock and pain as he leapt backwards, wondering when the literature had gotten it so very wrong and why he had to be stuck on an island where he couldn't call up the supposed experts in the field and let them know that ghosts didn't have to be cold if they didn't want to. That the new player on their already crowded chessboard might not be a ghost at all, but something new entirely, was not a comforting thought. Sawyer pushed it away as soon as it formed.

His ribs were yelping again as he jumped back and out the reach of the new thing, so loudly that Sawyer did not notice at first that the ground was not stopping him as it ought to have when he landed. Only for a few seconds, though, and then the sensation of falling became unmistakable. Sawyer yelled as he tumbled down a brand new rabbit hole, before he struck ground hard enough to send his ribs from merely yelping and into a brand new ream of agony. Had they been literally rather than only figuratively able to scream, it would have been of a pitch audible only to dogs. One great starburst of pure and brilliant white exploded behind Sawyer's eyes before he tumbled forward into a grateful blackness.

Sawyer didn't know exactly how long he was unconscious, but it could not have been for longer than a few minutes. He came to with the sensation of fresh blood running down his side from the stitches that had been pulled right out of the flesh that Jack had so painstakingly sewed them into only a day before, with his entire torso vibrating with pain, and with two people struggling to lift him up between them by his shoulders. As one of his shoulders didn't particularly like being shifted, Sawyer had just a few problems with that. His yelp of pain echoed and reechoed around walls that his eyes had not yet adjusted enough to let him see.

"Shut up!" the one-man boy band hissed at him frantically. Until their positions were reversed and Charlie knew exactly what kind of fresh hell that his movements were causing to a shoulder that had only a few days before had a bullet pass through it, thanks so much, Sawyer thought that Charlie could take his orders and shove them into any creative and uncomfortable place of his choosing. He struggled to stay as quiet as he was able, anyway, breathing hard through his nose. Call it a personal favor or call it the survival instincts that he could not quite seem to turn off, telling him that now was not the time to go announcing his presence in his usual energetic fashion.

"Then you might want to turn me loose, Elton, or at least work on your bedside manner." He could keep his tone down by concentrating very hard, Sawyer noted, but he could not quite keep the whine of pain from his voice. Charlie adjusted his grip until the screaming agony descended into a dull roar. Sawyer sighed, and his knees would have given out from under him if they had been capable of supporting weight at the moment in the first place.

"What happened?" Sawyer asked a few minutes later, when the act of simply breathing was no longer making him want to cry. He surreptitiously tried out his legs again and scowled when they told him, nope, not yet.

Michael, supporting him on his other side, used his free arm to point towards a ceiling several feet above them. By craning his neck upwards to the place that Michael was indicating, Sawyer could see a large hole punched through earth. For the moment, at least, the rain had ceased, but ominous rumblings of thunder from the outside said that the show was not quite over yet. Yellowing strands of grass hung down, waving in the night breeze that traveled down the hallway and ruffled at their hair.

"Whoever built this place dug their tunnel right out of the dirt, then used a kind of thatch to build the roof back," Michael said. He pointed towards the same aging grass that Sawyer had noticed seconds before. "But they haven't been taking care of it. See? It's rotten. All it was looking for was one good rain and just the right about of pressure to bring it down."

"So glad I could be useful," Sawyer growled. That rain might have had a different purpose than just letting him break the dirt with his back, considering how the monster had fled at the first hint of water, but until Sawyer knew who had issued that order he didn't think that he needed to share that information with the rest of the class.

Yeah. As if he needed anyone else trying to get him to march off into battle for them.

Sawyer blinked until his eyes adjusted to the gloom and asked, "Where's Jack?"

"Don't know," Charlie said. "He might still be up there with…that thing. Kate and Locke are missing, too."

"Oh." The monster might not be the issue that Michael and Charlie thought it was, but that didn't mean that there still weren't worse things running around and waiting to take its place. Sawyer took a deep breath and wondered if this was worry, or if he was just upset that Captain America wasn't there to wave the flag and be the hero for him. If his track record so far was anything to go by, then it wasn't a job that Sawyer was particularly suited for.

Sawyer blinked for several more minutes, but the shadows were not growing any smaller. "Don't suppose that either of you boys have a flashlight on you?" he asked.

"Packs got left up on the top," Michael answered, "and you missed the light show. Sawyer craned his neck so that he could meet Michael's eyes and give him a curious look. "Oh, yeah. Those Others have all kinds of creature comforts."

Surprises abounded. Sawyer was pausing to consider this when a tremendous sound, like a sonic boom spiraled out of control, echoed down the hallway and made the walls and ceiling tremble. They all cringed as dirt fell down on their hair from above, wondering if the admittedly rotten ceiling was going to take that moment to just give up and collapse. It didn't, but a moment later Sawyer though that it might have, that he might have been hit on the head without realizing it and was having himself one hell of a hallucination.

Silly him, hallucinations kept being the first explanation that he turned to, rather than accepting that the world he was involved in was really just that strange and inexplicable. Barely thirty seconds after the sound there was a tremendous pulsing and pushing in the air, as if it had come alive between one second and the next and was now struggling to throw them off. Sawyer swore as his vision changed for a few dangerous moments, letting him view the hallway through brilliant tones of green, and the place on his cheek where Passion's Lady had caressed him burned as if a torch had been applied to the skin. Curiously, Charlie's hands were they were touching Sawyer's bared skin felt every bit as hot. They both yelled and jerked away from each other.

Sawyer shivered as his vision returned to normal. The burning feeling in his flesh disappeared a few seconds later. Still gasping, Sawyer reached up and touched the skin of his cheek. He could not believe it when he met cool and unblemished skin. 'What the hell is happening to me?'

Michael had retreated a few steps and was now staring at both Sawyer and Charlie as if they had not only grown a second head apiece, but the heads were now having an energetic conversation with each other. "What the hell?" he finally managed.

Sawyer took several deep gulps of air and struggled to bring his panting back under control before he wound up hyperventilating. Even so, his breath still sounded like a train whistle in his ears. "Did you see it?" Sawyer demanded of Michael. A note of hysteria was rising in his voice. He didn't care. Sawyer needed answers and he needed them now, for the sake of his own mind if nothing else.

Michael shook his head and continued to look at Sawyer blankly. "The air did something strange for a minute, but…" He shook his head again, his eyes already going distant as he realized that the conversation wasn't going to bear any fruit in getting his son back. "Nothing."

Sawyer spun towards Charlie instead, who was examining his palm intently. "Did you?" It was delivered in an interrogatory tone only by default; Sawyer already knew the answer.

Charlie looked back up at him slowly, his eyes clear and calm. "I think that you're starting to run a fever," he said after a long pause. "You burned me. But I didn't see anything." Charlie shook his head. "What was there to see?"

Michael was telling the truth. Sawyer knew from liars, had lived among them for more than half of his life and had even trained a few of the more talented ones, and while Mr. Charlie Pace might fit that category at some point, he wasn't there yet. Sawyer stared at him, unsure if what he was feeling was anger or relief. Of all the times for the little shit to go spinning his games…but Sawyer was not the only one. Praise God and maybe even tip a nod of thanks towards anyone else who might be listening, but if he really was going crazy then he wasn't doing it alone.

Michael made an impatient sound and put his shoulder back beneath Sawyer's again as he began to sway. "Come on," he said. "We're wasting time. If this is the Others' place, then what do you want to bet that that they have my boy around here somewhere?" With another ominous roll of thunder, the rain started up again, pouring down through the gaping hole in the floor to splatter against what Sawyer now realized was a much-abused wooden floor. A few clods of dirt fell with wet smacking sounds.

That was a shaky line of reasoning if Sawyer had ever heard one, but until his legs were capable moving him forward on his own again he didn't' see that there was a lot that he could do about it. He had made a promise and he aimed to keep it, even if it was the only noble thing that he could claim in his entire life. The two bitches vying for his attention might as well have not been there at all.

Those were mighty big words, but as soon as Sawyer took a step he knew that it was going to be a lot easier said than done. He grit his teeth and focused on putting one foot in front of the other instead, trying not to slow Michael down too much as he tugged them forward. Even if they didn't find Walt here, the light going out, the air going squirrelly, and the complete lack of any Others so far in their supposed stronghold was making Sawyer feel more than a little twitchy.

They had not gone far when the sound of a single set of footsteps could be heard echoing towards them, running hard and gaining speed. All three of them froze, but there were none of the clever little hidey-holes that Sawyer had glimpsed earlier were within sight. They were trapped, adrenaline rushing so fast that Sawyer could swear he smelled it on the air.

Walt flew around a bend in the hallway instead of the monster that they had all been expecting. He took one look at all of them and then made straight for his father, and Michael wasted even less time in turning Sawyer loose and rushing towards his son. Sawyer staggered hard against Charlie, who barely managed to catch him before they both fell. Sawyer had the feeling that Charlie was about as happy about the situation as Sawyer was, but neither of them was willing to let the other go quite yet. Sawyer's palms tingled where he gripped Charlie's bare arm. 'You're a lying little shit,' he thought again. 'But if you think that you can deal with the dragon-either of them-then you're welcome to her. I've already had my fill.' Walt was carrying a flashlight with him, and as he opened his arms to receive Michael's hug the beam played across Charlie's face for a moment. He turned away as the light dazzled him, but not before Sawyer saw how dark the scab on his forehead had grown. He was still strangely relieved to discover that he was not alone any longer, no matter how ill-prepared the other person might be.

"My boy, my boy, my boy," Michael whispered over and over again as he held Walt tightly to him. He sounded as if he was on the verge of tears. Sawyer thought that it was a good thing, then, that Michael was not in a position to see the deep puncture wounds that had been carved out of his arms or the smears of blood that he was as a result leaving across Michael's shirt was he hugged him back.

There were two figures standing in the shadows beyond Walt, their features for the moment obscured by darkness. Sawyer feared the worst until they stepped forward, revealing none other than Sayid and Shannon. So this was what had come out of that search party that he had been hearing about. Walt was there, at least, so it looked as they had succeeded. Both of them also looked as if they had been in a battle or two. Shannon's lower lip was split and had trickled blood down her chin, while one of the fingers on her left hand was cocked at an odd angle and was already black and swollen. Meanwhile, Sayid had a gash over his cheek that had spilled blood across his neck and shirt. He was listing slightly from side to side, and Sawyer saw that someone had put a lump the size of a goose egg onto Sayid's temple. Must have knocked the soldier clear on his ass when it was delivered.

That was all well and good, and Sawyer was all for the happy scenes when they had time for them. The fact of the matter, though, was that they didn't. The power shortage was finally coming to be investigated and, just their luck, from the sounds of things they must be standing right near the fuse box. Sawyer tilted his head to one side as he heard footsteps coming, a lot of them.

Still leaning heavily on Charlie, Sawyer twisted around so that he could look at the stretch of corridor that they had just left behind them. "Guys," Sawyer said, waiting until he had their attention before he added, "think we could save the touching reunion for when we make it back topside?"

Michael was still hugging Walt as if he was afraid that the boy was going to vanish the second that he was released. No help there. He didn't trust Charlie much farther than he could throw him-much farther than he could throw him I now /I , let alone while he was healthy-and while Shannon looked resolved, she was also clearly terrified. If salvation was going to come for them, it was going to have to be with Sayid.

He looked down in the same direction that Sawyer indicated, his eyes narrowing to slits. Sawyer had the feeling that there were a few Others who were about to pay deeply for their working over of him.

"Let's go," Sayid said instead, coming to take Sawyer from Charlie and put his arm around his own shoulders. Sawyer twisted to look at him in shock.

"Would have figured a strapping guy like yourself to go for the route that would let you do the most ass-kicking," Sawyer muttered. "Sudden fits of pacifism don't really seem like your type of thing."

With all of the blood running down his face, Sayid's expression appeared even more formidable. "Looks like you already received enough for both of us," he answered. "The boy is more important."

"Can we just save the ambiguous repartee for later?" Shannon asked, her face tight and pinched. She went to Walt and, gently prying him apart from Michael, took one of Walt's hands in her own uninjured one. Michael wasted no time in seizing up the other. Walt looked both older and younger than he should have, and he was still wearing a deer-stunned look in his eyes.

Michael noticed the blood and the wounds on his son's arms for the first time. His expression hardening even further, he said to Sayid in a low voice, "I hope you know that I'm going to come back here and burn this place to the ground as soon as Walt is safe."

"I do not think that you'll have any shortage of company." If Sayid's voice was calm, then it was only because Sawyer figured that Ali had to have nerves of absolute steel at this point. The hands on his arms tightened for a moment.

Sawyer was glad that Sayid's injuries at least seemed superficial in spite of their ugliness, because he knew as soon as he took the first step forward that he was just about done. He could sense the alarmed, concerned looks that Sayid was throwing him without needing to turn his head as his knees wobbled beneath him. "Just let me push through this," he said in a voice that scarcely rose above a whisper; any louder than that and Sayid would surely hear how much he just wanted to lie down in the center of the hallway and let it be finished. "Don't count me out yet."

"Not until you die."

If Sawyer squinted right, he thought that maybe that could be counted as a compliment. He also though that Sayid was going to be really pissed off when he got his wish, because the pace that they were setting wasn't really blistering the ground beneath them. Sawyer could hear the Others coming closer, knew from the taut, tense way that Sayid was carrying himself that he knew it, too, even if the rest of their group seemed oblivious, and they had no weapons.

It would be the noble thing to suggest that he be left behind, Sawyer knew. He was the badly injured one, he was the one that was slowing them all down and keeping them from finding that elusive exit that had to be around here somewhere.

The noble thing. Yeah, Sawyer knew the definition of those words. He set his mouth into a hard line. But he knew how to be a fighter so much better. Fuck if he was going to rewrite all of his strengths at this stage of the game.

"Come on now, boys and girls," Sawyer panted as the echoes grew loud enough that even Charlie, Michael, and Shannon were beginning to look concerned. Walt still looked disturbingly blank and stoic, a pint-sized soldier before his time. Sawyer was fooling no one, not even himself, but it was the effort that mattered. "Give me something that tests me here."

It would have been better if he had not stumbled as he said that, if he could not sense every eye lingering on him and every person wondering how much farther he would be able to go on. It also would have been better if Walt had not stopped in from of an unremarkable door like any of the others that they had already passed by without comment or curiosity. The flashlight that he was still holding in his hand began to tremble in wide circles.

"Walt?" Shannon asked softly. "Are you all right?" She winced as soon as she said it, as if she realized immediately how foolish a question it actually was.

"The lights went out," Walt said softly, "and everything turned off. So I pulled free and ran." He reached out and pushed the door open so that he could disappear into the even deeper darkness beyond. Given that he was taking the light with him, they had no choice but to follow.

The room should have been unremarkable, rough earth walls and a filthy wooden floor like the ones that they had already been walking on for the last several minutes. For one short second in time, Sawyer ran his eyes over the walls and thought that he was right. Then he saw the chair in the center of the room, looking enough like something straight out of a dentist's office to make them all uneasy even though it was not for the hypodermics that dangled, empty and useless, from long wires at several points on the chair. Their ends still glittered with blood. Sawyer sucked in his breath sharply and glanced towards the barely clotted wounds on Walt's arms, knew that everyone else in the room was doing the same. Walt stood and stared at the chair without speaking, his hand shaking and making the light quiver.

"I'm glad that you showed me this, Walt," Michael said in a voice that was far, far calmer than it should have been for a man who had just seen the place where his son had been turned into a science experiment. Sawyer had heard that tone once before from a different man, and he stiffened. Before he could say a word, Michael walked over to the chair and, crouching for a moment to examine screws that had probably been bright and rust-free whenever this thing had been installed however many decades before, flipped it over with a mighty crashing sound. Even though he was as exhausted as any of them and probably still dehydrated from his earlier jaunt through the jungle, Michael wasted no time in lifting the chair back up again and hurling it against the wall. It fell back to the floor with a second, even louder crashing sound, one arm cracking off and hanging crazily by the wires attached to those damned needles.

In the ringing silence that followed, Sawyer finally found his voice. "Mike, if I could, I would give you a high five right now."

Shannon drifted over to a series of filing cabinets painted the hideous green color of pea soup and various bodily functions normally found in babies that always seemed to pop up in hospitals and research facilities. She tugged one open. Shannon peered curiously inside for a moment before pulling out a thick sheaf of files and, wincing, pinned them to her chest with the forearm of her bad hand as she went back for more.

"Good work," Sayid said. "Now, we must move quickly before we squander any more time." He pulled Sawyer back to his side and turned towards the door. Though he made a face when he realized that it was his fate to be handed from person to person like an over-loved doll until this was over, there wasn't a whole lot that Sawyer could do about it. He let Sayid half-carry him to the door, and then snorted through his nose.

"Oh, Muhammad," he said softly, barely registering Sayid's glare as the nickname resurfaced. "You had to go and jinx it, didn't you?"

The hallway had been dark when they entered the room after Walt, only lit with the shuddering beam of the flashlights, and empty as the evacuated tombs that Sawyer was willing to bet this island had more than its share of. There were only one or two lights added to the mix now, but it sure wasn't empty any longer. All of the Yosemite Sam rejects and their cousins that they had not brought upon the boat with them had filled the hallway between one moment and the next, without a sound to mark their arrival. Like ghosts. All of the hair on the back of Sawyer's neck rose up and he swore that he could actually feel all of the blood in his veins turning to ice before he realized that these people were solid and breathing and warm, these people were alive. Sawyer exhaled all of the air in his lungs on a shaky sigh and felt Sayid looking at him.

They were alive for now, but that sure didn't mean that they were guaranteed to stay that way. At the head of the group was the same son of a bitch who had shot Sawyer in the first place, looking even filthier than he had that night on the boat and about as old and weather-beaten as if he had been the first one to ever shout out, "There's gold in them thar hills!" Would that he looked as frail, though.

Sawyer pulled his lips back from his teeth in remembrance of how Yosemite's little presents had felt cutting through his flesh. Sayid himself stiffened, his face turning into a hard, cold mask that Sawyer had seen only once. That explained the mystery of who had worked him and Shannon over, then. A few feet away, the low level vibrating that Michael had been doing ever since Walt had been taken as he looked from something to do spun itself into an even higher register. Sawyer was willing to bet that Michael knew exactly what to do now.

"I didn't tell you that you could go, boy," Yosemite said to Walt, ignoring all the rest of them as if they did not even warrant appearing on his radar. The hair on the back of Sawyer's neck stood up even further at the tone in Yosemite's voice, until it would surely be able to pierce the flesh of anyone who tried to touch it, and his lip curled to an even more extreme degree. "You got a job that you ain't finished doing." Only for a moment, and to so slight a degree that anyone who did not make it their business to read every thought going through a mark's head would not have been able to notice it, Yosemite's voice shook. For all of their bluster and numbers, not a one of his people advanced.

'He's afraid,' Sawyer realized. 'Afraid of what?' Probably a stupid question, since Sawyer could think of two hell-spawned ladies right off the top of his head that it wouldn't be a good idea to cross paths with in a dark alley, but that still didn't explain why he wasn't advancing on their battered little group of wannabe warriors. 'Shit, is he afraid of _Walt_?'

It seemed like a damned stupid fear from someone who claimed to be such an all-fired badass, until Sawyer caught himself glancing Walt's way. The half-pint was still shaking, more haggard than any kid his age should actually look and still clearly scared, but the blank and weary look had been altogether erased from his eyes. The look that he was fixing onto Yosemite was not the sullen glare of a child being ordered to go and clean their room, but a sharp hatred, and adult hatred. Sawyer had a painful moment of recognition as he looked at it.

Okay, so when Walt could make promises with his eyes like that, maybe Sawyer could understand why Yosemite would be afraid.

"I don't want to," Walt said, thrusting out his chin and tilting his head at a defiant angle. The child might be gone from his eyes, but there were still traces of him left in Walt's voice and stance. Thank God for small favors.

Yosemite took a small step forward, leading Michael to take a larger one that put his body even further in front of Walt's as a shield. Still, their favorite trigger-happy hillperson took no more notice of Michael than he would an interesting fern that happened to be blocking his path. "Boy, you do not understand what will happen-"

"You deserve it," Walt interrupted in a cold voice. So much for the theory that some parts of his personality had been able to maintain a child's demeanor, that look said. "You deserve everything that she does to you."

Sawyer's blood ran to ice again, this time deciding that it wanted to stay there for a while. Yosemite hid it quickly, but Sawyer could see in his eyes that he was feeling the same thing. Gosh, and wasn't that just fabulous company to find himself stacked in.

"_Yes_." The green-eyed lady was there between one second and the next, taking all of Sawyer's senses and gleefully fucking with them so that she appeared to be everywhere, nowhere, nestled down in his bones and standing right beside him to whisper in his ear, "Yes. They do." She shrank down into herself to become one woman again, one body rather than an overarching network of _pulse_. She parted her lips, showing row after row of gleaming, glistening, _sharp_ teeth, and reached for Walt with her arms outstretched at the same time that Yosemite did the same.

So far as Sawyer could see, neither of those was a great option. His own promise ringing in his ears, he jerked away from Sayid and lunged forward, biting the inside of his cheek to the point of blood to stay in control of the pain, so that he could reach Walt first. His hand closed around Walt's arm in order to jerk him to safety at the same time that Charlie did the same from the other side, and Passion's Lady closed her hand around Sawyer's forearm instead.

Sawyer saw ozone and tasted green, and fell to the ground with his heart resting still in his chest.

'I gave one back. That's all that I can do.'

End Part Twenty


	21. Chapter 21

Part Twenty-One

Even though there was nothing that Jack would have liked to do more than turn right around and follow the labyrinth that the Others had built for themselves over the years and decades until they found this source that Locke had alluded to, so that Jack could tear its guts from its body with his own two hands, in the end they followed the sea. The smell of salt grew stronger the farther that they ventured out, the heavier with humidity the air grew, and with it all came a rich smell of earth. Jack would have thought that the smell of dirt would be overpowered by the water as they drawer closer to the ocean, but he supposed that if the clouds had finally released the rain as they had been promising to all afternoon and for most of the night and the earth was wet then it might still be winning out. The heavy feeling of electricity crackling through the air in appreciation of a coming storm seemed to confirm this.

It was the rational thing to do, traveling outwards until they found the sea, though Jack nearly punched Locke in the mouth again when he suggested it. The realization that their positions had been reversed was hardly a comforting one. Jack knew that Locke was right, however much he hated to admit it, knew that it was much better to travel to the outside and get their bearings back before they came back to rescue Walt rather than wandering around in disoriented circles until they were captured or killed.

It didn't matter how much he understood this rationally, Jack realized, and was even more disturbed by that thought than any of the very troubling ones that had come before it. He still had to clench his hands into fists several times until his own nails cut into his palms, using the pain to keep him grounded and away from simply running back down the corridor to fight every single one of the Others at once if that's what it took to get at the source and destroy this decaying castle once and for all.

Jack did not think of the source as anything other than a living thing, even though he knew that some form of geothermal energy was at least logically possible. Not with all of the other rude awakenings that he had been given about the true nature of the place that they were beginning to call home. 'How much faith do you have in Sawyer?' continued to fly about Jack's mind and batter butterfly wings against the inside of his skull, always coming back to, 'How much faith do you have?'

'Enough,' Jack decided finally, slowly forcing his hands to uncurl. 'I have enough.' In Sawyer and in everything else.

So they followed the smell and, eventually, the sound of the sea.

The hallway stretched on and on, curving now and then even though it never showed a fork or any sign that they were going to be given a choice in which way they turned. Jack waited for the cry of a minotaur that never came. The only sound audible was that Jack's own footsteps and all three of them breathing.

"This place is enormous," Locke said from a few feet to Jack's right. Jack jumped, for Locke moved with hardly a sound. "There's no way of knowing how long it took to build."

Jack thought of the rubble that they had left behind and said, "You said that the first computer was built in the 1940's."

"That we are aware of." Jack felt alarmingly as if they were on the verge of having an actual conversation here, rather than simply trading threats that came with brilliant smiles and raised hackles.

Jack threw Locke a sideways glance. He could feel Kate's eyes resting on them both as she maintained her half-walking, half-jogging pace from a few feet behind them. She made only slightly more noise than a cat as she moved. "Don't tell me that you're one of those conspiracy theorists, John. Do you also think that the government is holding secret briefings here that they don't want us to know about?"

Jack almost wanted to Locke to say yes. That way he could write him off as another crazy, one of hundreds that Jack had treated for their physical wound and then sent on their way to receive the appropriate psychiatric help.

The corners of Locke's mouth quirked up as he looked back at Jack. There was a spot of blood on the corner of his mouth from where Jack had struck him earlier, as well as a spreading indigo bruise. Jack felt something that wanted to be guilt but could not push itself over those final necessary steps. He shelved it along with the long list of other things that would drive him crazy if he looked at them yet. "A short time ago I had a conversation with a ghost, Jack," Locke replied in a mild voice. Trust in him to drag all that right off the shelf again. Maybe and Jack both needed to be put under psychiatric evaluation. "And it was not the first. I think it's about time that we stop making easy assumptions about was is or isn't possible."

Jack looked forward again so that he would not have to respond. The smell of the sea was thicker than ever on the breeze, a welcome distraction that would have ruffled Jack's hair if it had been long enough. He looked over his shoulder at Kate and saw that the wind had pushed her hair back from her face, and she was pushing forward into it. Jack wondered what thoughts had be going through Kate's mind and what freedom she was smelling on the salt-scented wind.

The breeze soon afterwards brought with it a lapping sound that Jack knew had to be the ocean. The tunnel began to brighten with a glow that was both lighter and sweeter than anything that the florescent lights could have thrown down even if they had still been working. The full moon outside, breaking free for the moment from the clouds that had been obscuring its face for hours. Jack's feet broke into a sprint without waiting for permission from the rest of his brain, uncaring of the extra sound that he was making. When the hallway ended and the cool moon shone down, Jack all but cried.

There was a crude dock stretching out from the rock face that the tunnel had been carved from, made of wood as old and worn nearly as slick-smooth as the boards that comprised the tunnel floors. Jack started to skid on the slick surface, bringing himself to a halt as the moon slipped behind its clouds again. The form of an ancient fishing boat, of escape, became a dark and shapeless hulk again moments after being glimpsed for the first time. Didn't matter; even without sight, Jack could hear the boat calling to him. A way out. A way _home._

Jack brought himself to a halt before he could careen off the edge of the dock and into the silver-black water beyond and laughed, putting his hand over his mouth to cover a sound that came very close to being a giggle. After all of that time waiting for rescue to come to them from the sea or the sky, and it had been sitting here all this time and waiting for them to take it. For the Others it might be a weapon, but for them it would be more than that. They would _make_ it more.

Jack walked towards the boat without hesitation, registering with only half of his mind that he could not hear Kate or Locke behind him. With the moon once again shrouded in clouds, the world felt as if it was waiting, the island at his back hushed and waiting for a sign before it erupted. Maybe the girl in white would lead the charge. Jack was sure that if his hair had been long enough it would have been standing on end, and he was very aware of the gaping maw at his back.

The boat rocked against the dock as a sudden wave picked it up and set it back down again. Jack almost imagined that there was a beast beneath the waves rebuking them for altering the established way of things, for trying to escape. Jack pulled his lips back from his teeth into a grin. 'Not going to work.'

The boat itself counted as modern on a technicality, in the same way that the computer that they had destroyed did. Lucky for them, it had none of the computer's forgotten, dejected air. In spite of the fact that there were only a few flakes and paint and numerous patches of rust covering the hull, the deck was kept clean and uncluttered. Jack turned his head back towards Kate and Locke and called out, "I'm going aboard!"

The two of them were still standing at the far end of the dock, locked in a heated argument. Neither of them looked particularly pleased with the direction that it was going. Locke's hand was gentle and fatherly on Kate's arm, but her own was clenched into a fist. There was a version of herself reflected on Kate's face that Jack had never seen before and that he did not like in the slightest. It hearkened back to far too many musings that Jack had had over the kind of person that she must have been before she came to the island, on what she had done that kept so much of her mind constantly fixated on escape now.

Concerned, Jack took a few steps closer to them. Her called Kate's name softly and felt his own hand curling into a fist when he glanced Locke's way. Kate jerked her arm free from Locke's grasp and glanced at Jack when she heard the sound of his voice, looking quickly over his shoulder. Even if the fickle starlight Jack could see her eyes widen. "Jack, look out!" Kate yelled, already lunging forward.

Six weeks of living on an island where the only sources of nourishment were fruit, fish, and fresh water and where everyday chores were a physical struggle had taken Jack's body and molded it, stripping away the useless fat and turning the muscle into something that more closely approximated granite. Jack spun to the side as soon as he heard Kate's warning, barely even giving himself time to process the words. He crouched slightly to maintain his balance on the slick wood and as a result felt the blow that had been meant for the back of his head come down across the broad plane of his shoulders instead. Even though it was only a glancing blow rather than the full-on knockout that his attacker had envisioned, it felt as if the sun was going nova beneath the surface of his skin, and he staggered hard. Jack had not been in a real fight since he was in college, but all of the instincts still came back in a rush between one second and the next. Jack refused to freeze up, instead twisting away so that he could face his attacker. A second blow whistled by his head and would have brought him to his knees if it had connected. Jack exhaled in gratitude, for his left arm was already tingling from the shoulder all the way down into the elbow. The third try was not going to be the charm, either, as Jack saw it coming from the corner of his eye and caught his attacker's wrist before it could come within a foot of his face. He found a new and faintly sadistic edge for his medical training by putting his thumb into the underside of his attacker's wrist and pressing with all of this strength on the tendons and nerves located there. Jack heard a short cry of pain and watched as the short length of wood that had done such a number on his shoulder fell to the dock with a heavy clunking sound. It rolled away, over the edge and into the waves. Gritting his teeth against a momentary urge to dig his thumb in even harder as payment for the fact that it would be hours before his shoulder stopped aching, Jack dragged his attacker away from the shadow of the boat and into the light. The clouds obliged by rolling back, turning the scene into one almost as bright as the day.

The wrist that Jack had grabbed was filthy, both it and the arm that it was attached to so lined with dirt and something that looked as if it might even be dried blood that it was impossible to gauge age from skin alone. The face was little better, with thick fingers of hair that might have once been platinum blond but were now brown for the dirt ground into them dangling in front of features that were not much cleaner. By squinting very hard Jack was able to tell what was dirt and what was the work of long hours or even years in the equatorial sun, but it was no easy task. Jack put his age as somewhere between fifteen and thirty-five, though the panic in the gray-green eyes that stared back at him made him lean towards the lower end of that scale. The maybe-child hissed, showing Jack a row of teeth that were still intact and in relatively good condition, all the while continuing to squirm and struggle. In spite of the fact that every move Jack made sent a hollow thunking sound reverberating up and down the dock and even Kate and Locke were making soft padding sounds as they came up behind him, the boy did not make a single noise as his feet scuffled and dug for purchase on the highly polished wood. The boat was the only place that he could have come from. Jack cast it an apprehensive look, wondering what other surprises were waiting to pop out at them.

"Easy, easy," Jack caught himself saying in a soothing voice, ignoring for the moment that this was the same person who had tried to break his skull open only a few moments earlier. "Calm down." The sound of the kid's panting was the loudest one on the dock, and his face was rapidly turning a clotted magenta color as he drifted closer and closer to the edge of hyperventilation. He wasn't trying to fight Jack any longer nearly so much as he was only fussing and squirming in a mindless attempt to get away. Jack ignored his shoulder and grabbed at the man-boy's other hand as it flailed by his face. "Okay, okay, relax. What's your name?" He could feel Kate and Locke coming to a halt directly behind him.

"LeggoofmeNOW!" the youth yelled instead, flicking his gaze over Jack's shoulder. He renewed his struggle, sounding closer to the edge of outright panic that ever before. The youth reared back at last, showing a boot that looked as if it had been through three generations and numerous patches before it had come to rest on this particular foot, and aimed a kick at the meaty part of Jack's thigh.

Jack grunted in pain as it connected and felt his grip loosen just enough to let the kid pull free. He made a short hooting sound of triumph before he finally lost his footing on the slick wood. The kid's yelp was cut off abruptly as he fell off of the dock and into the dark water beyond, his skull making a horrible hollow sound as it struck the edge of the dock in passing. A dark glitter of blood was left behind on the wood.

Jack rushed to the edge of the dock and fell to his knees, leaning over the edge so that he could peer into the waves. There wasn't so much as a ripple to mark the place where the kid had been.

Old habits died hard. Jack barely glanced over his shoulder at Kate's shocked expression and Locke's impassive one before he dove into the water himself and felt it close over his head.

End Part Twenty-One


	22. Chapter 22

Part Twenty-Two

Well, fuck.

"Honeymoon's over?" Sawyer wheezed from his doubled-over position as soon as he smelled the first hint of the moss and heard the crackling of the fire. He kept his good hand clutched to his chest, from where his heart felt as if it had been set on fire and was doing its very best to leap out of his chest in response. Unlike his previous visits, all of his injuries were flaring into brilliant agony and growing worse by the second. Tears of pain sparked in Sawyer's eyes and ran down his face.

His heart wrenched, staggering him, and it was all that Sawyer could do not to go down on one knee. He split his lips into a wide grin to keep himself from screaming. Never let them see you cry, never let them see you die. Sawyer would hang onto that maxim for as long as he was alive and even beyond. "Unless you're the secret snuggling type and just never told me. Hey, I understand. Image and all." Sawyer flicked his sweat-soaked hair back from his face and looked up at last.

He had assumed that Dream Date was silent only because she was waiting to make one of her precious goddamned entrances. Instead, it turned out to be a pure and unbridled rage. That shit made the world go around.

"Why should I?" she snapped. "If you're just going to be hers in the end, anyway, why should I bother to play nice any longer?" If the last several days had been Dream Date's idea of playing nice, Sawyer would have hated to see what she was when she was in a snit. He took several deep breaths through his nose and waited until the world stopped seesawing back and forth through the pain.

Dream Date stood just in front of the fire, almost directly on top of it. Given the look on her face, Sawyer would not have been shocked if she had taken a step backwards, into the flames, only to have them shiver and run away from her immediately. Her hands were clenched into fists by her sides, her whole body vibrating with the energy of a sun on the verge of going nova. Had her heart still beat, Sawyer was sure that her face would have been scarlet with fury.

At the moment, though, it was his own heart that he was most concerned about. Sawyer staggered again, unable to stop the groan that rose up from the depths of his throat as another sharp, spiking pain rolled out from his chest. Shit, and it looked as if he might be heading for that light that Boone was either too stubborn or too stupid to find on his own, after all. Actually staring down death was quite a different situation from idly wishing for it whenever he had been drinking too heavily.

"You were supposed to give one back," Dream Date whispered. She sounded beyond angry; she sounded as if her whole world had been ripped out from under her. Devastation made her even younger, icy blue eyes that would have been at home on a much older woman or not. In this light, Sawyer would put her age at no more than sixteen. "And instead you, you…you go with _her_, when she's the one who took it from me in the first place."

Sawyer hissed hard through his teeth and sank down to his knees. "Sounding like a broken record there, sweetheart," he growled. Pain had driven his voice down into a register that he had never heard before. "And from where I'm standing-" He chuckled mirthlessly and braced his hand against the ground to keep himself from falling even further. "So to speak, it sure as hell does seem like I managed that." Under his breath, Sawyer muttered, "Now let's see if I can pay the price to do it."

Sawyer had no doubt that Dream Date heard him-somehow, this bitch always managed to hear him-but she wasn't much interested in his death's door mutterings at the moment. Her shaking was growing more pronounced by the moment. Outside of being merely angry, Sawyer thought that she even looked ill. He glanced down at his hands and realized that the moss that he had been crouched on was growing rapidly, overtaking his fingers and beginning a slow trail up his wrist. Sawyer yelled and found the strength to lunge back up to his feet, flinging the moss away from himself. He half-expected to see it climbing over his boots when he looked back down.

"You were supposed to give it back to _me_," Dream Date said, just this side of shrieking. Tears welled up in her eyes, rolled down her face, and vanished as soon as they dropped off the edge of her chin. "This is the only place where you can give one back."

Sawyer didn't doubt that, not with everything else that he had seen over the past several days, but this was not the place to debate the whys and the wherefores. Black spots were dancing before his eyes and it wouldn't be more than a few seconds before he fell all the way, whether he liked it or not. Even if this particular choice was still in his hands, Sawyer didn't think that he would be giving one back to Dream Date, anyway. Pain had driven this girl crazy a long time ago. It was written all over her eyes.

Now that Sawyer was really pausing to think about it, lunging forward like that had maybe not been the smartest thing that he had ever done in his life. Those instincts of his were finding ways of overwhelming his common sense, instincts that were coming back faster and stronger every day. Sawyer sometimes felt as if they would drown him, one on top of the other so quickly that he couldn't keep his head up for much longer.

"Too late," Sawyer said, speaking as much to his own anxieties as he was to Dream Date. "Can't turn it back, even if I wanted to."

Dream Date stamped her foot against the ground; it shuddered. Sawyer did not think that the two events were related. The swift, fearful look that she flicked all around seemed to confirm this. She turned back to him finally, still crying angry, helpless tears. "But I didn't deserve it!" she said. "I didn't deserve what they did to me, I didn't deserve what they took from me, and _you do!_" Her voice rose closer to hysteria with every word. Even though he had been expecting it and for that matter did not particularly disagree, Sawyer flinched back. "You deserve to be punished, and they deserve to be punished, but now she's free and I'm dead, and there's no one around who can make it right, and if I can't get one back how can I make it right?"

"I don't know, sweetheart," Sawyer said, for once not putting any mockery into the nickname. "But I can't help you."

The air changed, a warm wind moving through the trees when Sawyer could not remember there having been so much as a breeze before. It was hot like air rolling out of an oven was hot, humid and crackling with lightning, smelling of ozone and moss and decay. Sawyer jerked back hard when he smelled the moss, that scent of things living and dying and stories that had not even begun. It was thick, cloying, like a woman who tried to wear too much perfume in order to compensate for other failings. Sawyer nearly gagged on it.

Dream Date lifted her face to the wind and tasted it for a long moment before she lowered her gaze again to look at Sawyer. Her eyes were clear, cold, and shrewd in spite of the fact that they were still filled with tears. "She does," she said. "She deserves it."

That left a long list of possibilities. Sawyer opened his mouth so that he could tell Dream Date not to worry, that making deals with the one devil in a blue dress-close enough-at a time was more than enough for him. Before he could open his mouth, though, Dream Date was gone. Not walked away, or slowly shimmering into nonexistence, but was _gone_. Meanwhile, the wind grew stronger.

If Sawyer made it through this, he was going to find that Straub book and burn it, one page at a time.

An unseen hand cupped his face and stroked his cheek, moving over the exact same skin that the woman with the green eyes had caressed earlier. Sawyer jerked back even further, though he wasn't really up to moving more than a few inches at a time. The surrounding foliage seemed that much brighter between one second and the next.

_Freed me yes love you yes loveyouloveyouloveyou could take such good care of you yes could protect you yes like the other one yes bled for me yes tasted it loved it want only a little just a taste yes just promisepromisepromise._

Mention of the other one might have aroused more concern in Sawyer if he had not been so busy panicking over far more general things, like the fact that every time that he thought the world could not get any stranger, nope, there it was. "What?" he gasped, though the sudden brightness of the ferns all around him made him think that he already knew the color of this woman's eyes. "What the fuck?"

_Protected you from them guided you here got you here made the sharks turn back from you want you you like the other one like the last one just say yes just swear it to me and I can give you one back I can take one from the boy and give it back that dangerous boy that hatehatehate boy_.

Every hair on Sawyer's body was standing straight up in the air and his body was running hot and cold by turns, as if the physiological signals were so scrambled that he did not know which way to even turn now. They had left the regular world so far behind them at this point that it was no more than a blip in the radar screen.

Sawyer grunted and went back to his knees, moss be damned, as his hear again felt like someone was stabbing it with a fork and then twisting as hard as she could. "Sorry, sweetheart," he said, and none of the momentary gentleness that had colored his voice while he was speaking to Dream Date remained there now. "But I don't exactly think that I have one left to give, and I'm damned sure not in a mood to go on bended knee and be knighted even if I did. Rebel complex, you know that whole drill, I'm sure."

The invisible hand drew back as swiftly as if Sawyer had turned his hand and snapped at it. _I control everything that happens on this island. I control you. Wait and see._

It echoed and reechoed, going from whisper to shout and back again before Sawyer's heart beat twice, even if he could be sure in this place that his heart even needed to beat at all. Turned out you could pass out in the middle of a paranormal dreamscape just as easily as you could lose consciousness back in the real world. Sawyer would be sure to make a note of that for his memoirs.

--

Sawyer woke again with a mouth pressed down over his, warm and pliant and of a softness that was undeniably female. He would enjoy it so much more if his ears were not ringing from the newest dragon lady to enter his acquaintance, if his head was not tilted back at an aggressive angle so that that oh-so-pretty mouth could blow air down into lungs that, from the feeling of things, had been slacking off on the job. A hand was pounding down on his chest hard enough to hurt even if his ribs had not been creatively rearranged. Sawyer gasped and sucked fresh air down into his lungs so fast that he was amazed that he did not swallow his would-be rescuer's tongue, lurching upwards and ignoring his ribs as they threatened to stage a rebellion. It was just one drop in a very large bucket at this point. Joe Schmoe and his probable appendectomy be damned, if he got out of this then Jack was going to part with those heavy sedatives.

Sawyer nearly collided noggins with Shannon as he jerked up and into life. She reared back just in time to avoid having her nose smashed into his forehead, her eyes wide and panicky, her lips parted as she gasped for breath. Sawyer wondered if she even saved any for herself, or if she had been pushing it all into him. Mess or not, she was still the prettiest woman in the world to him right at that moment, and Sawyer opened his mouth for one of the rare occasions when he wanted to offer a woman a compliment without expecting a damned thing in return.

The magnanimous impulse was dampened a tad when Shannon reared back with her good hand and slapped him.

"Ow!" Sawyer pressed his hand to his stinging cheek and glared at her. The compliment could wait, he decided. She was lucky that he didn't point out that her busted lip was going to push her past Angelina Jolie and into bad collagen injection territory before the night was over. "What the hell was that for?"

"You wouldn't wake up." Shannon sounded on the verge of tears. Sawyer hated it when women cried in front of him, especially when he had no way of making his hasty escape. "I thought that someone else was going to die."

Sawyer was so gratified to find himself placed on the short but apparently growing list of people that Shannon Rutherford gave a damn about that he decided not to point out that the odds were still in favor of a whole lot of other people dying before the sun rose again. "Where'd you learn to do CPR, anyway?" he asked, rubbing at his head. His ears were still ringing so badly that he could barely hear Shannon even though she was crouching right in front of him.

"Boone taught me," she said, suddenly looking shy.

Yeah, Sawyer would just bet that he did,. Now there was a family with issues to make his own look like nothing more serious that a predilection for temper tantrums. Sawyer continued rubbing at his head and took several deep breaths until his lungs had convinced him that they could take it on their own from here. His heart still felt as though someone had taken a baseball bat and tried to knock one right out of the park with it, but it was beating steadily, that lub-dub rhythm that Sawyer was never in his life going to take for granted again.

"I have to go," Shannon said, rising to her feet. "I only stayed to try to get you breathing again." She looked quickly around the room until she spotted the wreckage of the chair that Walt had been imprisoned in. Walking over to it, Shannon seized one of the needles, stepped on the tube connecting it to the chair, and tugged. There was a moment of resistance before it ultimately gave way, emitting a puff of sickly-sweet gas into the room.

The ringing in Sawyer's ears diminished enough so that he could hear the sound of a lot of bodies slamming against each other just beyond the doorway, and not in any kind of fun pornographic way. There were shadows moving past the opening when Sawyer focused hard, hardly any more noticeable than ink against midnight. There was a tremendous crash, a grunt of pain, and the unmistakable sound of something wet splattering against the floor. Just when he was starting to have faith in it again, his heart stuttered in his chest.

"Holy hell," he muttered.

Shannon let loose a humorous little laugh as she tested the hypodermic against the pad of her thumb. She sucked away the bead of blood that welled up before she answered. "Pretty much. I think that's what they put on the brochure." She started to turn and limp towards the door, only to pause. Looking back at Sawyer, her eyes widened. "Your arm," she said.

Sawyer glanced down, knowing without needing to ask that she was referring to the place where the newest queen on their chessboard had grabbed for him. There were a series of red marks stamped into the flesh there, almost deep enough to be called burns. As Sawyer watched, a faint green glow rose from the skin for a second before it disappeared. Even knowing that it had been meant for Walt and that he had done what could objectively be called a noble thing, Sawyer felt his mouth go dry, and he felt like putting his fist through the nearest wall. He was only slightly gratified when he remembered that everyone else had also seen the green-eyed lady before Sawyer had thrown his self-preservation right out the window, that if he really was going crazy, then he was doing it in fine company.

Shannon took a deep breath. "I wish I was on acid," she announced calmly before turning and walking out the door.

Sawyer had long since begun to wish that he was on acid, too. He took several more deep breaths, putting his hand against his chest so that he could feel his own heartbeat and reassure himself that it was still there. Shannon had barely stepped out the door when there was a thump and a feminine cry of pain. Alarmed, Sawyer began to push himself to his feet, only to fall back a second later as his muscles informed him that his license to control them had been revoked until he could show better judgment. "Fuck," he muttered. Being useless was only entertaining when he was doing it purposely.

There were still a few lights glittering in the room from the electronics on the chair that had stubbornly refused to turn off when the power had gone out. They blinked in a pattern that would drive Sawyer right out of his mind if he tried too hard to decipher it, read and green, red and green. The light was not strong enough to let Sawyer see any way in which he could help his…okay, they weren't _friends_, exactly, but they were being added onto his own short list of people that he would not throw under a train if he was given a chance and might even give a damn about. Not strong enough to let him see a way to help them, but also not weak enough to avoid throwing out long, multicolored shadows. All right, so maybe those shadows were not dangerous-Sawyer did not think, though he was not discounting anything at this point-but it aided in heightening Sawyer's overall anxiety over this new feeling that had been gathering over him like a wave for some time and was just now beginning to crest, this feeling of _ought_.

The green-eyed lady emerged from the corner of the room, grinning at Sawyer with clean white teeth that convinced him in a moment that she had never been human. Sawyer scrubbed at his cheek reflexively where the unseen hand had caressed at his face. He felt as if he was rubbing a fine layer of slime off of his skin.

"Don't think so, sweetness," he told her. "I've given one back. So far as I'm concerned, that puts my days of making deals with women that I can see through at an end." Sawyer did not know if he had given one back at all, if that was even possible while he was still on this earth, and if that was enough to tip the scales even if he had. "Go to hell."

Still grinning, the green-eyed lady cut her eyes towards the door, beyond which the shadows were not exactly telling a happy story. 'I control everything that happens on this island.' "Won't you make one more deal? For me? For them?" Sawyer inhaled sharply between his teeth.

"Don't." Sawyer jumped, immediately regretted the action, and swore at length so that the universe as a whole would know exactly how much he regretted it. He swiveled his head once he had finished and the world had stopped spinning around and saw Walt, crouching only a few feet away with his arms folded neatly over the tops of his knees. The boy's eyes were cat-wide, and the dried blood ran down and wound in circles around his arms, an ourobouros. Sawyer was just crowded with interesting company tonight. "Don't say yes to her."

Green-eyed Lady (passion's lady, Sawyer could not stop his mind from chiming in automatically) hissed at Walt without making a sound, but kept her distance. Certain things that Dream Date had said before vanishing began to coalesce in Sawyer's mind to become a great and terrible theory. He shivered before he could halt himself.

"You turned into a mind reader since you left, little man?" Sawyer asked. It was at least a logical possibility at this point, he allowed. Sawyer would decide probability once he had figured out how that theory was going to go.

Walt shook his head slowly and moved at last, coming to nestle against Sawyer's side. He never took his eyes away from the green-eyed lady. That made two of them, and the lady for her part seemed content to stare at them with her creepy little grin and let the events in the hallway turn out however they would. Doing the math in his head, Sawyer realized that she was probably going to turn out to be right. His own realization of being dead weight was bitter, bitter.

Walt was pressed up against Sawyer's side as if he would meld himself against his ribs if he could find a way. He was clearly still terrified and was shivering violently in spite of the eerie moments of calm that would occasionally come over him. Sawyer's arm twitched for a moment as he came within an inch of lifting his arm, putting it around the boy's shoulders, and giving him the hug that he so clearly desired. It was amazing, he thought, that moving one limb could turn out to be so damnably hard.

"No," Walt said at long last. Sawyer had not realized that he was going to speak; at that point Sawyer had almost forgotten that he had spoken himself. "But I know what she is."

"I'll bet you do." Sawyer couldn't stop himself from glancing towards the remains of the chair and felt Walt doing the same thing. The boy shivered even closer into his side. "Don't worry, little man. I don't know exactly what she is, but I got enough of an idea." The marks of fingers (of chains) on his arm and around his ankle began to itch, hot and cold in alternating turns.

Michael and Charlie staggered back through the door, both of them bleeding from a dozen small wounds and a few that were not so small. Michael's leg was soaked in blood from the thigh down, and it was by an obvious act of will that he was even keeping himself on his feet. It was Charlie that Sawyer could not take his eyes from, though, Charlie who had, he remembered, lunged forward to protect Walt at the same time that Sawyer had when the island's toothiest resident had shown herself. Charlie was not limping and did not seem to have received any wounds, other than the fact that the burn on his forehead had opened up again. A trickle of blood was running down the side of his face, across his neck and into the collar of his shirt. Sawyer again thought of snakes.

Charlie and Michael, Sawyer noticed, were each carrying a long, thick needle like the one that Shannon had liberated before dashing out. They weren't guns or even knives, but Sawyer still figured that they could do damage in a pinch. He very carefully didn't glance down at the obvious evidence of this etched across Walt's arms.

"There's too many of them," Charlie said, breathing hard and staring at the dark opening that marked the door. Sayid and Shannon burst through a second later, leaning heavily on each other. Tears were running down Shannon's face and she was shaking so badly that if Sayid had not been there she probably would have fallen down, but neither was she showing any signs of running for the hills. "We'd need a miracle."

Sawyer glanced towards the place where he had seen the green-eyed lady last before he could stop himself. She was long gone, off to wherever place ghosts or goddesses of whatever the fuck her random bits of ectoplasm made up went after a hard day at the office. Walt's shivering grew even more pronounced. Sawyer put his arm around him at last, if for nothing else then because he thought the little man was going to fall over otherwise.

The doorway was crowded with faces, none of them quite daring to come close even though their opponents were clearly trapped. Sawyer even wondered why for a second, until he realized that Walt had stopped shivering beneath his arm and was once again fixing the Others with that old, adult look. So Pandora's box was not quite so easy to close again once it had been well and truly opened. Sawyer was all eaten up with sympathy, really.

"All we want is the boy," the leader said from the doorway. He again sounded young, pleading and scared. Sawyer thought of how Walt had once sounded young, and how now he didn't, and wished instead that he had a weapon himself.

"Situation didn't work out so well the last time you tried that line, Yosemite," Sawyer said in a low voice. "Might want to pick a different script."

Yosemite Sam snarled for a moment before his gaze happened to fall own to Sawyer's arm, where the mark of a hand was still clearly visible. His expression cleared to become suggestive, almost leering. "By now you know that there are forces on this island, dangerous ones," he said in a reasonable voice, like an elder trying to impart wisdom onto a stubborn child. "You think that she's dangerous now. She's weak here. The jungle is her real place. That boy." Yosemite broke off to point at Walt. "He's special, like the one before him was special. He can hold her back. Otherwise, a lot of people are going to die before this is over."

Yosemite might be able to talk with the voice of a grandfather rocking in a porch swing, but that didn't mean a damned thing. Sawyer knew this game. He bared his teeth, saying, "I have a way with women," at the same time that Michael said, "I'm not seeing a single thing wrong with that plan." A buzzing sound began to fill the air.

When Sawyer had half-facetiously asked for a miracle before that was not quite what he had meant.

Yosemite grinned from the doorway. "You'll come out one way or the other," he said. Sawyer was treated to the truly bizarre sight of the first of the voracious little mechanoids swirling into the room above Yosemite's head and across his shoulders without a single one attacking. They way as well have been pet birds.

There was nowhere to run to, even if Sawyer had been sure that he could stand. He braced himself for the inevitable feeling of thousands of tiny teeth slicing strips from his flesh, when from beside him Walt said very clearly, "No."

The monsters froze in the air as swiftly as if they had become representations in a photograph rather than creatures of flesh and…well, instead of real creatures. Sawyer squinted and saw that they were trembling in the air even thought they could not move forward, the way that a person would in indignation or even fright, the way that the Others were even now. Sawyer had a strong feeling that the one before Walt had been dramatically fair-skinned from spending so much time down here and had worn a long white dress of a loose, linen-like material. He took one look at the Others' expressions and knew for a fact and without even needing to ask that she had never been able to do what Walt was doing now.

That raised the question of what, exactly, Walt _was_ doing now. "No," he said again, more loudly. His voice was still a child in timber, but in expression it had already become much older. "None of you deserve to be here." He closed his eyes as if he could not bear to look and burrowed even further into Sawyer's side, until Sawyer had to grit his teeth hard to keep from gasping. A second later he gasped, anyway, and understood why Walt had closed his eyes.

The monster spun and attacked its master. That was their miracle, delivered through the mind of the little boy that the Others had already been trying to alter. Sawyer turned his face after the first few seconds, but he couldn't stop himself from hearing it. When the sound ceased, Sawyer opened his eyes and then spent several seconds holding an interior debate about whether that had been a good idea or the worst one that he had ever had.

"Little man…" Sawyer began when he had gotten used to the sight of so much red, only to trail off again helplessly. This wasn't the kind of work that you praised somebody for. Even if it was work that needed to be done, anyway, it still should have been done by someone else who already had blood on their hands, him or Sayid or even Michael. "Where did it go?" he asked finally, realizing that he could not hear anything buzzing, no matter how hard he listened for it.

"I threw it in the ocean," came Walt's succinct reply.

"Good boy," Sawyer said, realizing that the rest of the group was staring at him and Walt as if they were a pair of snakes that had been backed into a corner, angry and scared and with unknown poison coursing through their fangs. He glanced down at his arm. The burn was still there, still glowing green when he turned his forearm just the right way. And he had for one brief second allowed himself to get optimistic, too.

The ground shivered as Sawyer looked back up, and from a distant corridor there was the sound of a tunnel collapsing. To Sawyer's ears, the sound of it was almost celebratory. The dirt and the unvarnished wood in the hallway were drinking up the blood at an alarmingly quick rate. Well, if Yosemite had been telling the truth, then she probably had a lot to celebrate with the Others' demise. Sawyer would be raising a glass in toast, too.

"She'll be happy," Sawyer said finally, ignoring the stares except to stare pointedly back when they went on for just a second too long. "That don't mean that she'll forget about the sprog here, or what his gray matter could do to her if he takes a mind to. Call me crazy, but maybe we ought not to be under ten tons of dirt when she makes up her mind on that score."

It was like breaking a spell. Michael came forward and lifted Walt into his arms with no more strain than if his boy had still been a baby. Sayid took up the task of lifting Sawyer back up to his feet and putting his good arm across Sayid's shoulders. Much as Sawyer was not digging the sensation of being everyone's favorite rag doll, it was a little pointless to argue against it when he could not stand on his own.

"How much-" Sayid murmured in Sawyer's ear. He nodded towards a clump of raw hamburger and glittering bone. It was as good a guess as any. "How much of what their leader said to you was true?"

"About my way with women?" Sawyer chuckled and then winced. "Every word. I'll even take yours if you don't watch out." Though Sayid's lips twitched for a moment, that was clearly not what he had meant. Sawyer sighed. "I didn't cut any deals. Not with that thing. I'm not exactly privy to inside information."

Sayid nodded as if this was merely confirmation of what he had already known. "I had to ask," he said.

"I know. I ain't offended." Sawyer struggled for a moment until he was able to force his knees to take at least some of his weight. "Let's just leave, all right? This is always the part of the movie where the damned temple comes crashing down."

Nearly an hour of searching after that brought them an exit, a place where the earth began to slope gently upwards into the air of the early dawn. If you had been trapped in the darkness for long enough, Sawyer discovered, light did have a smell, delicate and sweet.

When there was a figure waiting for them at the end of the tunnel, Sawyer couldn't say that he was surprised.

End Part Twenty-Two


	23. Chapter 23

Part Twenty-Three

The water was shockingly cold as Jack dove beneath the surface. He opened his eyes and twisted through the water, searching for any sign of the kid. 'It's not going to be like Joanna,' Jack caught himself thinking. 'I won't let it be like Joanna.' It became a chant inside his head, almost a war cry.

There was no hint of blond hair or flailing limbs anywhere in the water, no matter how hard Jack looked. Something cold and fishlike touched against Jack's thigh; he jerked away impatiently without looking around. His lungs had long since begun to burn and a small interior voice to tell him to give it up, that it had been a lost cause since the beginning, and in any case he was risking his life for someone who probably did not deserve saving.

'It's not about who deserves it,' Jack thought, making no attempt to halt or slow his downward dive. Only a few feet deeper. He would stop when he was no longer sure that he had enough air to take him back to the surface.

Something darkly red wavered in the corner of Jack's vision, and he turned towards it even though the youth's head had not been bleeding all that badly. Extending his hand, he felt something silky slide through his fingers, though it was too dark under the water for him to definitively see what he had touched. That kid had exceptionally soft hair, considering how dirty it was.

Jack stretched out a little farther, until his questing fingers found an arm, almost as if he was being guided to it. He closed his hand around it reflexively and jerked the kid to his chest before he began swimming for the surface. By splaying his hand out across the kid's chest, Jack could still feel a heartbeat moving beneath the surface of the skin. Thank God for that. Black spots were dancing in front of Jack's eyes and there was a roaring sound in his ears. He clutched his inert burden to his chest as his head broke the surface of the water.

A few fat raindrops struck the waves as Jack emerged gasping, sullenly, as if the clouds would grant them this small mercy only before they wanted something in return. Jack was just glad for the air. He paused to pull in several deep breaths before he shifted his grip on his unconscious burden and swam them both back in the direction of the dock. Kate and Locke both had their heads turned back in the direction of the tunnel as if in scrutiny of some troubling sound. They turned back when they heard Jack calling for them.

Locke leaned over the side of the dock and extended his arms out to Jack. "Take my hands!" he yelled over the wind that was rising all around them and turning the ocean into a white foam.

Jack shook his head before he realized that with the darkness and the waves, Locke might not even be able to see the gesture. "No!" he yelled, pausing afterwards to spit out a mouthful of saltwater. "Take him first."

Locke hesitated long enough to make Jack think that he was going to pick now of all times to renew their pissing contest. Finally, Locke shook his head and grabbed the youth beneath his arms, hauling him up and onto the dark with no strain whatsoever in spite of the fact that the kid was dead weight and had to be carrying at least thirty pounds of water in his many layers of clothes. Meanwhile, Kate leaned around Locke and braced her hand against one of the dock supports so that she could extend the other one down to Jack.

The feeling of smooth wood beneath his hands was almost enough to bring Jack to tears. He only paused to enjoy it for a few moments before he raised his head and yelled at Locke, "Is he breathing?"

Locke stared down at the kid with a mild distaste as he rolled over and began to retch up all of the saltwater that he had swallowed. "I believe that's an indicator of breathing, yes."

The kid rose up to his hands and knees so that he could keep heaving. He pressed his hand to his temple, where a scarlet flow of blood was still trickling. The kid swayed back and forth as he looked up at last and realized that he had an audience, and one that could not be by any stretch of the imagination considered friendly.

The effect was immediate and electric. The kid scrabbled backwards on his hands and knees, not even bothering to stand fully upright and not seeming to realize as he did so that every step took him that much closer to falling off the edge of the dock again.

Jack's nose and throat were still burning with seawater; he did not particularly feel like mounting a second rescue on the heels of the first one just because the kid was working himself up to a mind-blowing case of panic. "Oh, no, you're not," Jack said, lunging forward. He grabbed the kid's ankle and jerked him back across the dock towards him. One of the kid's fingernails caught in the wood and made a sharp snapping noise as it pulled away. Jack and the boy both winced.

'If he would just calm down for a minute…' Snorting at how ridiculous the entire situation was becoming, Jack dodged the kid's kicking legs and sat down on his abdomen instead, grabbing the fists that immediately came flying towards his head. "Okay," Jack said, pausing for a moment to get this panting under control. "So we're going to calm down and try this again, all right?" Jack was doing his very best to keep his voice low and soothing, as he would while speaking to a wounded animal that might or might not have teeth. It would have been a lot easier if he had not been clenching his teeth hard enough to make all of the tendons in his neck stand out, if there wasn't a painful knot already rising up on his shoulder from where the wounded animal had decided to take his aggressive tendencies out for a spin. "You don't hit us and we won't hit you. Does that sound like a good plan?"

The kid squirmed and otherwise did his best to get a leg free so that he could kick Jack in the head. Jack swore and fought to regain his balance as he was nearly bucked off, raising his hand quickly to stop Kate as she came forward with an intent expression. Locke stood quietly to one side, his arms folded over his chest and a look on his face suggesting that that he was filling up mental files at a prodigious rate. Jack forced his fists to uncurl and jerked his attention away from Locke just in time to avoid being struck in the face. He grabbed the kid's arm and forced it back down to the dock.

Jack took a deep breath and unclenched his teeth before he wound up chipping one of them. "I don't think that you're doing the math here," he said to the kid, jerking his chin in the direction of Kate and Locke. "And you might want to think about the water that I just fished you out of. Or do you 'Others' not understand the concept of gratitude?"

The kid gave one final, desperate lurch and then fell back against the dock, his hair fanning out like a waterlogged halo around his head. The whiteness of his face made him appear even younger than Jack's original estimate, and the blood on his temple contrasted with the pallor as sharply as wine spilled across a linen tablecloth. He tilted his head back, exposing the long line of his throat as if he was waiting for the sacrificial knife to come down, and closed his eyes. The lids did not fall shut before Jack saw the gleam of pure panic there.

Jack should not be feeling like the guilty one. He sighed.

"We'll start simple," he told the kid. "What's your name?"

The kid remained quiet, his lips pressed tightly together, until Jack was sure that he was going to be ignored until he gave up and shoved the kid over the edge of the dock again. "Paul," he finally whispered, barely moving his lips.

"Paul," Jack repeated. "Good. See, this is better than hitting each other, isn't it?" Paul's tightly compressed lips begged to differ. "All right, Paul. How long have you been here?"

"Born here," Paul said. He had a knack for speaking while hardly moving his mouth at all, so that Jack had to lean very close in order to hear him. He tensed in anticipated of being head-butted at any moment.

"How long ago was that?" Jack felt as if he was trying to get a medical history out of a patient who was senile, had ADD, and was probably high. The wrists that Jack was keeping pinning down to the dock twitched spasmodically beneath his hands. On drugs, _and_ with violence issues. Jack pushed down on the tendons until Paul stopped and gave him a look that definitely did not come from a wounded rabbit. It reminded Jack for a moment, painfully, of Sawyer. "I'll cut you a deal. You talk to us, you answer my questions, and we won't hurt you. We'll let you completely walk away from this."

Locke made a small movement. Jack glared him into keeping his silence. When he looked back at Paul, the boy was still wearing that Sawyer look. A fishhook twisted through Jack's gut. God only knew where Sawyer or any of the group was at that moment, or how well they were doing.

"I don't know," Paul said in response to Jack's question, tilting his head back and closing his eyes. "There aren't any seasons."

Fair enough. Jack eased his weight slowly to the side, so that he was sitting next to the kid rather than on top of him. Paul opened his eyes and watched warily. The rabbit was long gone, leaving something behind that could easily grow into a predator if it was allowed to dig its claws into the loam and run.

Jack narrowed his eyes and told himself not to forget where this kid had come from, bloody head and pathetic appearance or not. "Have you seen a kid running around that tunnel of yours? Ten years old, black, probably terrified right out of his mind?" It was probably a good thing that Jack was no longer touching Paul, as a growl had entered his voice and his hands had clenched themselves into fists without his permission. They longed for one frightening and disorienting moment to grab at Paul's tendons again and squeeze them until they popped, until he finally got some damned answers that actually made sense. Maybe if Paul asked nicely Jack would even think about stopping.

"I…" That was fear there. That was also guilt.

Kate came forward and knelt beside Jack. "Did you see him?" she growled at Paul. Jack raised his eyebrows at her.

Paul only looked at the both of them for a moment before he lowered his gaze back down to his hands. "Never seen him," he muttered. "I'm…young. Not one of the originals. I don't get told a lot of things."

"Originals?" Kate echoed. Some of her natural curiosity began to crawl back into her voice, stripping the diamond-edged hardness away.

"The first group. The ones who have been off the island." Paul was speaking more to his hands than he was to them. The words began slowly and then gradually grew faster, as if he had lanced a wound by beginning and could now not get the poison out fast enough. The guilty look had grown to be much stronger than the fearful one. "They came here to run an experiment."

"What kind of experiment?" The last question came from Locke, who had dropped his impassive impression of a Sphinx long enough to lean forward. His expression was a hungry one that Jack had never seen before, one that made him think of wolves that chased little girls in red hoods through darkened trees. It was more fitting than Jack liked, and probably more so than Locke realized.

Paul glanced up for a moment when he heard Locke speak, only to look back down at his own knuckles immediately. His hands were the most fascinating things in the world to him at that moment. "The human mind," Paul said at last. "What a certain kind of individual can do if they're…pushed far enough."

The pause that followed was ominous enough to make Jack and Kate stiffen and sit up straighter at the same moment. Only Locke did not shift, but Jack still though that he saw lines of displeasure deepening around the man's eyes. Paul hunched his shoulders further, looking more miserable than ever. Hesitating between each word as if they tasted bad and he had to gather his strength in order to even make himself say them, he went on, "Long-range black ops, other things like that. But it went bad."

"Went bad," Jack repeated in a low voice. The kid seemed to be vibrating on his own internal wavelength at this point, as if he had been carrying this story around and hating it for years and was now almost relishing the chance to get it out. Jack did not want to disrupt that rhythm.

Paul flicked a glance over him before he began to study his battered and waterlogged boots. "In case you haven't noticed," he said, speaking loudly enough to be heard by all, speaking almost defiantly, "this is not a normal place. She doesn't like it when people think that they're better than her. Doesn't show the right amount of respect."

Jack stiffened and put his hand against the dock so that he would not leap immediately to his feet. He knew without looking around at his companions' expressions that they would also be thinking of a woman-girl dressed all in white. He did look at Locke, finally, who only lifted his shoulders slightly without taking his eyes away from Paul and said, "I've been saying that for a long time, Jack."

Jack turned back to Paul and ordered himself not to shudder as he did so, no matter how many ice cubes were being slipped down the back of his shirt. "We can talk about all of that later." Paul scooted back a few inches and looked as if he was strongly thinking about leaping over the side of the dock again. "The boy. Do you know where he is?"

Paul hunched his shoulders even further, until they were nearly touching his ears, and began playing with one of his shoelaces. "Never saw him," he repeated in a mutter. "But the other one, the girl, she died a couple of months back, and it started to get bad again. A week ago the island started to play nice, like it used to."

Jack had told himself until that point that the kid was cooperating with them, that he was painfully young and only slightly less a victim than they were. He had even caught himself in unguarded moments feeling sorry for Paul, mentally going over the supplies and antibiotics that he would need when they got back in order to treat the head wound and keep a lung infection from growing as a result of the near-drowning. The rage that came over him and replaced the doctor's instincts did so quickly that Jack was almost a different person from one moment to the next. He did not think that anyone was more surprised than he when his hand closed around Paul's throat so tightly that there was hardly even enough room left for him to wheeze. Paul's head bumped against the dock, hard, as Jack slammed him backwards. Kate put her hand against his arm, not yet restraining him, but reminding him not to lose control.

"And you never thought that this was something that you should have checked out?" Jack was roaring without caring about how loud he was or who the sound was drawing to them. "You never thought that it might be a child?"

Paul's throat convulsed as he tried to speak. His face was turning dark with trapped blood. Kate's hand flexed against Jack's arm; he took a deep breath and forced his fingers to uncurl far enough so that Paul could draw a shuddering breath.

Paul panted for a few moments without speaking before he said, "We have to live." He averted his eyes away from Jack's face when he had finished saying it, as if he realized already what a weak excuse it was once it had been said out loud. That near-flinch of reluctance was the only thing that kept Jack from hitting him again.

"Then you should have fought," Jack said coldly. "And not used children as dog leashes." He moved his hand away from Paul's throat and to his arm so that he could haul the kid to his feet. Once there, Paul became engrossed in his boots again and refused to look at any of them. "You might not have seen Walt, but I'm still willing to bet that you can point us in the right direction." Jack's voice could have turned the entire island into a glacier if he maintained it long enough, the tone was so cold. "You've just been promoted to tour guide."

Paul blanched and inched backwards as if he meant to jerk away again. "I can't," he said. "Do you know what will happen-"

"Your people are holding one, possibly several of my people hostage," Jack said. "And that's just what you've done to us this week. The welfare of any of you is not my top priority at this point." Jack was sure that his smile was glittering and sharp. "If it helps, you can tell them that I had you under duress."

Paul grew even more pale and looked as if he meant to argue further, when a rumbling began from deep within the island and extended out to the dock itself. The boat made an alarming sound as it rocked back and forth against its tethers, and all four of them had to bend their knees and fight in order to keep their balance. The tunnel that they had emerged from collapsed in on itself with a resounding crash of dirt and rock. As the sound echoed away, Jack almost thought that he could hear a woman laughing.

Paul's mouth fell open as he watched, his expression a warring mixture of gratitude for his sudden reprieve and dismay. Jack could feel his face settling into hard, angry lines. 'Please let the rest of my people not have been in there.' He didn't know if he was praying to the God of upstanding WASP stock, to the unbridled force that seemed to lurk around every tree and beneath every blood-red flower here, or if was a general plea to the universe at large.

"Boat," Jack gritted, forcing himself to loosen his grip on Paul's arm before he hurt the kid. "Now. We're moving on to Plan B."

"But I don't know how to drive it," Paul protested as Jack started to drag him away down the dock.

Jack paused so that he could stare at him. "You were guarding it." His voice was colored with disbelief and a suggestion that now would be a very, very bad time for Paul to start lying to him.

Paul had to have his feet memorized by now. The more that Jack was around him, the more he became convinced that the kid was not even old enough to buy a drink back in the real world. "Wasn't guarding it," Paul muttered. "I was sleeping on it." He jerked his head towards the remains of the tunnel. Against the aged quality of the rest of the cliff, Jack was not sure what the new wound resembled more: a mouth or an eye. "I don't like being underground if I don't have to. There's not enough air."

Some of the people who had been terrorizing them for the past two months were claustrophobics. Jack felt like asking the world at large if he had been placed on a hidden camera show by mistake. "You don't have to drive, then. You just have to sit tight and not go running off to ring the alarm bell." He pushed Paul towards the ladder on the side of the boat and waited until he had disappeared over the top before he clambered up himself.

Jack tensed up as he brought his head and shoulders over the top of the boat, very aware that he had sent the most hostile member of their group up unsupervised and without knowing what kind of weapons might be on board. When the blow that he had been expecting never came, Jack eased himself over the side of the boat to see that Paul had gone to sit on the pile of blankets that he had presumably been sleeping on before he had been woken up by their voices on the dock.

"Sitting tight," Paul said in response to Jack's look. "Not running off to ring any alarm bells."

"You're a real go-getter." Jack found his balance and turned to help Kate. Locke hesitated on the dock, staring at the boat for a moment before he climbed up himself.

"There's a gun in one of the drawers there," Paul said suddenly as Kate's feet touched the dock, pointing into the cabin.

"Thanks," Jack said slowly, wondering where the sudden burst of honesty had come from and if there was something in the cabin that was going to bite him as soon as he crossed the threshold. He entered, anyway, watching through the window as Locke stepped onto the dock and very close to Kate. He dipped his head to whisper something in her ear that made her shake her own head in return. Jack frowned as he began going through the drawers, coming across the gun at last on top of a battered stack of manila folders. After first making sure that the gun's safety was on, Jack began flipping through several of the folders. His eyes widened.

"There are some pretty detailed maps of the island in here, Paul," Jack said, coming out of the cabin with both the gun and the folders in his hand. There were some fairly difficult equations, too, but he would save those so that Sayid come take a crack at them.

"Yes." Paul had not moved from his seat and was running the loose end of his shoelace through his fingers again. The dirty knots of his hair kept flopping forward into his face, rendering his expression into shadows and guesswork. "Probably I shouldn't have let you see those."

"Probably not," Jack agreed. "Do you have any aspirin on board?"

Paul looked confused. "What's that?"

"For your head, it's…never mind. I gave my bottle to Sawyer to carry, you can have some when we catch up to them." Kate stared down at the deck when Jack mentioned Sawyer's name and didn't look up again until Jack nudged at her. "Hey. Got a present for you."

Kate laughed when she saw that Jack was giving her a gun. "What's the occasion?"

"There's no reason for me to be carrying two." Jack thought of how Locke and Kate had been whispering to each other a few moments before. "And because I trust you. I just wanted you to know that."

A soft inward glow lit up Kate's face as she took the gun from him, one that many women who have worn while accepting a pearl necklace. "Then I commend you on your romantic instincts." She flushed as soon as she realized what she had said. Jack rubbed at his sore shoulder and wished that there was some way of fixing this other than time.

"Your people must be quite the experts when it comes to rationing," Locke said to Paul as he knelt to examine rows of gas cans that were stocked against the far side of the dock. Paul was shrinking back against the railing and looking as if that was still not nearly enough distance to satisfy him. Jack had known that there was a reason that he almost liked this kid. Locke picked up one of the cans and shook it, listening to the slosh of gasoline inside. "This boat has to be at least sixty years old, but there's still enough fuel here to get us halfway across the goddamned Pacific." They all jumped, even Paul who did not know that Locke did not swear, in spite of the fact that Locke's tone was nothing but pleasant.

"Let's hope so," Jack said, turning away with the folders still in his hand. Scarcely a second went by before he realized that this had been a mistake, perhaps the biggest mistake that he could have possibly made under the circumstances.

Locke swung the gasoline can in a broad arc that left it connecting hard with the base of Jack's skull, and this time there was no one to shout a yell of warning. A sunburst of white light went off behind Jack's eyelids, and he felt the curious sensation of his knees refusing to hold him for several seconds before the pain had a chance to catch up with him. Jack tried and failed to catch himself on his hands and he tumbled downwards towards the deck. His lip split as his face struck the wood, sending blood rushing down his chin. The maps and papers flew out of his hands and across the dock.

Jack could feel blood running down the back of his neck from where the edge of the can had cut into his skin, but it was a distant sensation, wavering in and out between one second and the next. The voice of his father echoed through his head: 'Don't you pass out now, Champ. Don't you dare, not with this much riding on you. Be stronger. Be better.' Jack closed his eyes, rested the side of his face against the cool wood, and for several seconds did nothing else other than breathe.

Paul made the yelping sound of a frightened puppy as Jack hit the dock. Kate shrieked, whether in fear or outrage Jack could not tell. He did not get the answer until a few seconds later, when Kate yelled, "You told me that you weren't going to hurt him!" and then he wished that he had not.

"No, Kate, no." Jack turned his face away and murmured into the dock. He put his hand against the back of his neck and rolled painfully over. The stars in the sky above him were still spinning around and running together.

Kate had her gun turned towards Paul, who for his part looked perfectly content to stay right where he was. The blood on his temple was the brightest thing on his face. 'Yippee,' Jack thought dizzily, 'now we can be twins.' Kate was fairly pale herself, and the hand holding the gun was shaking.

Locke, meanwhile, had inspected a few more cans of gasoline and then had begun turning them upside down across the deck. The sharp, burning smell made Jack's eyes water. If the look that Kate was turning Locke's way was any kind of indicator, they weren't going to need any matches to set the whole thing ablaze.

"You said that you weren't going to hurt him," Kate repeated. Her gun hand was shaking harder than ever, and now the tremble had entered her voice as well. Jack would have been more inclined towards sympathy if his head had not been throbbing so badly that he could not be sure whether the trembling in Kate's hands was real or only illusion. He had a lot of reasons to wonder which parts of Kate were real and which were imaginary.

Locke glanced first at Kate, then at Jack, before he went back to his business with the gasoline. "And I didn't," he said calmly.

Kate looked back towards Jack, her mouth falling open in a gasp. Jack thought that she would have rushed over and swept him up into a hug if not for the unfortunate business with the gun. He only held eye contact with her long enough to make her flinch before he shifted his gaze onto Locke. "What are you doing, John?" Jack called, pushing himself onto his elbows and grunting when his head protested the movement.

Locke paused long enough to spare him a withering glance for the patronizing tone that he had employed. "What are you planning on doing with this boat, Jack?" he said. "There's enough gas here to get you halfway to civilization. _Halfway_. You load up this boat, and you're going to get a lot of people killed." Locke paused to splash more gasoline, shaking his head. "And if you think that she's going to let us get even that far, then you're even more deluded than I thought. We still have things to learn."

_She_. Jack had gotten really fucking sick of _her_, whoever she was, and he had not even know of her presence for a full twelve hours yet. "Were you listening to a damned thing I told Paul?" Jack asked, struggling to keep his voice calm and neutral in spite of the fact that what he really wanted to do was yell. If there was a time in Jack's life that he had been angrier than this, then he could not remember it. He did not think that his inner ear would stand up to a direct attack just yet. "Unless you really want to say that Walt is better off here, being hunted."

"None of us are better here, hunted," Locke said. He jerked his head back in the direction of the collapsed tunnel. "Speaking of someone who just said that the best thing was to fight…" Locke finished and set down the empty gasoline can before he looked at Jack hard. "And even if we wiped all of that away, there's still the lack of fuel. You load a whole bunch of people up in this boat, you're going to take them into the middle of the ocean and get them killed there. That's the not the kind of decision that a leader makes, Jack, and so I'm not going to let you make it."

Jack flinched backwards and for a moment was almost, almost tempted to believe. 'How much faith do you have?'

Not enough.

"Bullshit," Jack growled. Locke twitched and looked at him. From the moment that they had met stretching forward into now, Jack could count on both hands the number of times that he had seen Locke genuinely surprised. This was by far the sweetest of them all. "You're just giving in to her, whatever the hell that she wants you to do. Don't you dare try to lecture me on what a leader does."

Another shocked look let Jack that he had hit the nail right on the head, and damn him, damn him, damn him. Kate's gun hand had begun to shake even hard, so that she was unlikely to hit anything even if she remembered to fire it.

"And don't pretend that you know what fighting is," Locke said. "Don't pretend that you even have a clue. We have had things _easy_, compared to what they could be."

"I'll learn," Jack grunted. His inner ear declared that it would allow him to rise back to his feet, finally.

Kate's gun wavered even further. "Locke-" she started.

"No," he said, not even bothering to turn and look at her. Had he done so, he might have seen the look that crossed Kate's face, that stubborn I-want line that Jack knew well. His heart leapt upwards to see it.

Kate's hand twitched; Jack realized that she was bringing the gun back around to bear on Locke. He didn't have more than a second or two to observe the motion before all hell broke loose and could never bring himself to ask afterwards if that was what she was really doing, but it was what he liked to believe. The sudden flaring of life back into her eyes, at least, that he could be sure of.

The jungle beyond the cliff rumbled. No, Jack realized, the jungle _buzzed_. Through the trees and rushing down the side of the cliff in a rippling, silvery blur, the monster came to pay them one last visit. "Oh, fuck," Jack snarled before he found himself still rushing forward to protect Kate. Paul yelped as the air was filled with the whirring of wings and the chittering of teeth; likely he had never seen the Others' nastiest invention this close before, much less been attacked by it. There was a splashing sound that Jack could barely hear over the skittering of metal and wings across his skin.

Panting harshly in his ear, Kate swore and fired the gun. Jack did not know what she was firing at, what the hell she thought she was going to hit when their enemy numbered in the hundreds, the thousands. A second later, there was a roaring sound as the bullet pinged against the railing and threw a spark down on the gasoline, a rush of heat. Jack had no idea if she had intended that or not. Didn't matter.

Jack raised his head from the cloud and realized that he could not see Locke or Paul, though the fast-growing flames were throwing everything into sharp relief. "We have to go!" Jack yelled into Kate's ear. She nodded, bringing her hand up to protect her mouth as she coughed. Jack broke away from her to gather up as many of the maps and papers as he could before the flames reached them. The smoke was driving the monster above their heads for the moment. Jack did not know how that was possible with creatures that did not, strictly speaking, need to breathe, but Jack was not going to look a good turn of fortune in the mouth.

It made a whole lot more sense the next second, when Jack realized how wrong he had been. The monster rose in the air above their heads and hesitated for only a second before they parted and plunged directly into the waves. The crackling of the fire killed any sound that they might have made.

The caverns of the Others' refuge might be poison, but they surely could not stay on this boat. "Water," Jack said into Kate's ear, hoping that the little bastards could short-circuit even if they could not drown. "We'll have to swim for shore." He barely waited for Kate's nod of agreement before he threw himself overboard, feeling Kate follow only a second behind.

Though Jack was still wet from plunging into the water earlier, the shock of the cold was still enough to make him open his mouth and take in a startled gulp of water. He twisted, searching for Kate through the blood that was still billowing out from the back of his skull. A hand came out of the darkness, warm and sure, seizing Jack's arm and tugging him upwards. They broke the surface together.

Kate was still holding the gun, but now seemed uncertain as to what she was supposed to do with it. She struggled for a few seconds to tread water and stow it away in her pack at the same time before she turned with Jack to look back at the burning boat. There were no figures moving about on the dock or in the water around it.

"Come on," Jack said at last, paddling backwards. "God only knows what else could be waiting to jump out at us."

Kate followed a more cautious pace. Her eyes locked on his, equal parts anxious and defiant. "Jack," she began.

"It can wait until we get back to shore." He forced off exhaustion that made him feel as if all his limbs had barbells attached to them and swam slowly in the direction of the beach. Twice Jack thought that he saw a strange glow from deep within the jungle, twice he told himself that he was imagining things. The clouds that had been hovering over all of their heads like sullen children broke at last, sending cold, fat raindrops onto their heads. The first pink fingers of the dawn began to crawl over the eastern horizon.

When the beach drew close at last, Jack's sense of relief was so great that he had to pause and tread water for a moment just so that he could look at it. He and Kate shared a small smile, their first since jumping over the side of the Others' boat. "I might regret saying this," Jack said. "But that's the most beautiful thing that I've seen in my life." He began to swim forward.

He had barely gone more than a few strokes before something cold and strong seized his ankle, dragging him under before he could do so much as make a sound. He kicked out hard on reflex, feeling his foot connect with something soft, something that slid when he impacted it. The first rays of the rising sun pierced the waves a second later.

'But you're _dead_,' Jack thought stupidly, wondering how many more times he would have to pronounce that same sentence before the varnish wore off. His eyes moved past Joanna to the numbers rising behind her, many of them dressed in the rags of bygone eras and with hardly a scrap of flesh left on their bones. And at their head was a woman.

She was not chill and sterile white like the ghost girl in the corridor, but a rich, warm caramel achieved by years spent baking out in the sun, with long brown hair that danced in the waves. Her eyes were electric, and she reminded Jack of sensuous, overripe fruit, though he could not say how. The woman grinned at him from beneath the waves, triumphant.

"This is my place," she said clearly, in spite of the fact that she had to be drawing water down into her lungs by the gallon. "And you'll do as I say."

There were so very many things wrong here, but Jack would get around to having a psychiatric break about each and every one of them when his lungs were no longer demanding that he breathe and breathe _now_. Jack brought his free leg up and then back down on Joanna's face. There was a reverberating crack of breaking bone, but no blood. Jack imagined that it had all congealed away by now. The grip on his leg loosened, and he surged up towards the light.

"The gun!" Jack gasped as soon as his head broke free of the waves. The sun was still battling it out against the roiling clouds, punching holes through the waves that let Jack see dark shapes moving beneath him. The rain had already begun to taper off. "Kate, shoot the gun!"

Kate was staring down through the water, her mouth fallen open in shock. At Jack's shout she jerked, nodded, and thumbed the safety off before pointing the muzzle downward. "Don't you dare jam on me," she said, both to the gun and the universe at large, before she fired several shots down into the water. The waves were immediately filled with a heavy black substance like squid's ink, too thick to be blood. Without needing to say another word between them, Jack and Kate spun around and made for the shore at a speed that would have made any competitive swimmer green with envy.

When Jack felt his feet touching the deep, silty sand again, the feeling was so good that he was almost sure that he was imagining it. He and Kate threw their arms around each other's waist as their knees began to wobble at the same moment. Jack collapsed as soon as he was out of the reach of the waves and rolled over to face the sky, letting the sun dry the sweat, sand, and blood onto his skin. He could wash later; right now he just wanted to enjoy the heat.

Kate hesitated for a moment before she sat down cross-legged on the sand, setting the gun down carefully between them. Though Jack could hear the sand shifting beneath her as she moved, he did not turn his head in her direction until she called his name. The rising sun as at her back, picking up the gold and red highlights in her hair and making them glow.

"Locke made me an offer when we went hunting together," Kate began. Jack concentrated very hard on not letting his expression change. "He said that something big was on its way, and that it was up to me to decide between building a life where I can find it or running until the day that I die." Kate stared at the gun between them as she spoke, every now and again reaching out and running her fingers across the water-slicked metal. She let out a humorless laugh. "As if I can't still do that even when I'm standing still. Deal or not, if that boat had not caught fire I would be running on it right now. Just so you know that."

"What changed your mind?" Jack kept his voice rushed, reasonable, even though he really wanted to scream and yell. He wasn't even sure who he would be yelling at at this point.

Kate paused, stopped tracing her fingers over the gun. The shadows on her face shifted; it took Jack a moment to realize that she was trying to smile. "I told you that I had your back, didn't I?" Jack reached out and squeezed her hand before he tugged them both back to their feet. He kissed her on the forehead as soon as they were both upright. Kate sighed. "I guess I'm not done running yet, huh?" she asked, looking out across the ocean.

Jack thought something else entirely. He let his hand fall down to rub a circle in the small of her back and said nothing. Jack stooped quickly to pick up the gun from where Kate had left it in the sand. They would need all of the weapons that they could get, if what's Jack instincts were telling him was true.

"Jack, look at this," Kate said as he straightened. Several yards away, barely visible against the sand and already being whipped away by the wind, was a line of footprints leading away into the jungle. Jack felt his entire body tensing up, growing fierce and angry. He did not realize that he had tightened his grip around Kate's waist until she glanced up at him.

"Which one of them do you think it was?" she continued.

Jack grinned and did not imagine for a second that it was a pleasant sight. "Guess we'll find out eventually." He tugged Kate in the direction of the waiting jungle. "Let's go find-" (Find Sawyer.) "-the rest of the group."

The trees began to quiver and shake as Jack and Kate passed beneath them, so slightly that no one standing on the beach would have noticed.

End Part Twenty-Three


	24. Chapter 24

Part Twenty-Four

Given the number of women that he had screwed over and whose lives he had ruined over the course of his life, Sawyer reasoned, and he couldn't really bitch when he found himself being plagued with them now. Call it karma, the wheel of fortune, a big, fat universal smack-down. Lord knew that he had been carrying around this bill for long enough before payment was finally demanded of him.

"Hey, there, Princess," Sawyer said, the first in their group to find his voice enough to speak to the icy-white queen glaring at them all. Well, he had a bit of a leg up on all the rest of them in getting used to her. He and Dream Date were practically buddies at this point. "If you're looking to sign me up for a crusade again, forget about it. I get home from this, I'm going to sit on my ass and collect disability checks until I'm nice and fat."

Dream Date only glared at him, like he hadn't been exposed to that often enough to develop a nice immunity by now, and turned away. She only went a few feet, walking stiff-legged, as if her insides had been filled with glass and all but the smallest movement was an agony to her. She didn't bear any injuries that Sawyer could see-he didn't even know if it was possible for a ghost to be wounded-but that didn't mean anything. You could feel like that, all cut up inside and like there was nothing left at all, without having a single mark on you.

Now was not a good time for those instincts to make another one of their show-boating appearances, the ones that other people would have called his better but which for him were still very much the rarer. His life would be so much easier if he could just learn to turn them on and off, like a light switch when he didn't want to be in the room any longer.

"Take me to where she's going," Sawyer said to Sayid, since he had long since given up any pretense of walking on his own and decided to enjoy his new life as an invalid of leisure. "I need to see." The words had exited his mouth before his brain had time to really process them, making him wonder for a moment if they had been his at all. The marks on his arm and his ankle ran hot and cold by turns; he could be anyone's puppet at this point and he might not have a clue. They all could.

Sawyer was enjoying that revelation _so_ much, and he really wanted to thank the universe for giving it to him.

Sayid turned his head slowly so that he could give Sawyer a look suggesting that he find his brain from wherever he had lost it back in the tunnel and slot it back into his head again. With the blood and the bruises covering his face, it was fiercer than it would have appeared otherwise. Sayid's whole body was trembling with the need to lay out some of his special brand of charm all over Dream Date's ectoplasmic hide. That wasn't a philosophy that Sawyer had any kind of trouble getting behind, but he already could have told him that it wouldn't do any good. Whatever horrors had been visited on Dream Date in her life, she was long past them now.

"Have you gone mad?" Sayid whispered into Sawyer's ear.

Sawyer chuckled and then winced. "Days ago. C'mon, she don't bite. Not while you're awake."

Sayid gave him another look, this one suggesting that he was going to take Sawyer's confession of madness to heart, but it was difficult to argue when the girl herself was standing right in front of them. He helped Sawyer shuffle forward to where Dream Date was standing among a particularly verdant patch of ferns and vines, staring down at them with a look of intense hatred fixed onto her face. Sawyer was not surprised to see a hump in the earth there, once fresh but reclaimed by the jungle in record time. No wonder the growth was so green here; Sawyer imagined that it was getting plenty of fertilizer.

"This is what she did to me," Dream Date said coldly, staring at Sawyer through those chilling eyes. The anger there made them even colder than they had been on the first day that she and Sawyer met.

"No, Dream Date," Sawyer corrected her. "This is what _they_ did to you." He jerked his head back in the direction of the tunnel that they had just emerged from and nearly overbalanced, so that Sayid had to steady him quickly before he fell. "You picked a real action hero, by the way."

"It's the same thing," Dream Date spit. "You should have stayed with me. I would have been so much nicer to you than she will."

Walt broke away from his father long enough to come stand by Sawyer's side. Sawyer was very aware of the boy's breath fanning out across his elbow as he spoke. "Then you picked yourself one hell of a knight, sweetheart. I don't look out for nobody but myself. Don't know how."

Dream Date smiled, small and chilling and even a little sad. "You're an idiot," she said. "Do you think she cares about what you want? Do you think she cares what kind of person you are? You're meat to her, you all are, and now that you're free she's just going to gobble you up like-" Dream Date's voice rose towards another one of her eardrum-assaulting shrieks as she worked her way into the rant, her eyes flashing only slightly bluer than ice. Sawyer of all people knew from drama queens, having brought it damned near into an art form himself, and he saw all the signs that she was enjoying her chance to give another grand villain speech. Pity they never got to hear the end of it.

The air above Dream Date rippled, spasmed. She looked up quickly, her lips parting in horror, as the light itself shifted and changed until it formed a mouth full of gleaming and ready teeth. Dream Date scarcely got out the beginning of a scream before the trick of the light slammed down over her, obliterating her between one second and the next and leaving not so much as a trace behind. So maybe Sawyer had been wrong when he had thought that death was the end, that there was nothing else beyond that that could hurt you. He couldn't say that he was exactly fired up to see where that path led.

Shannon was in the way of the mouth, the portal, whatever the hell had just opened up, and she would have been dragged in or worse herself, had an invisible hand not seized her by the scruff of her neck and jerked her backwards hard. She shrieked as she was pulled off her feet and deposited hard on her ass several feet away, staring at a figure above her that no one else could see. "_Boone!"_ she managed at last.

Sayid abandoned Sawyer-thanks, buddy-and darted over to Shannon as soon as he heard her shout, so that Sawyer tumbled heavily to the jungle floor. He caught himself on his elbows to spare his ribs the worst of it, staring as the mouth lowered itself to the jungle floor and shifted until it was once again wearing the form of a very familiar woman. Karma. Right.

The green-eyed lady dragged one finger along the side of her mouth as she approached, though Sawyer for his part could see no mess there that needed to be mopped up. When this one destroyed someone, she did it neatly. "Do you have any idea what it's like to listen to someone whimper for sixteen years straight and have no power to shut them up?" the lady asked, shaking her head. "Maddening, the insolent little bitch."

Sawyer personally thought that this one had gone right around the final crazy bend in the road some time before, but now did not seem like the best time to bring a detail like that up. Not after the demonstration that he had just been given. If only he and his legs were still on speaking terms with one another.

Sawyer could hear the rest of the group moving a few yards off, not pushing close enough to attack just yet, and he wondered why in the blue hell they weren't taking the opportunity to run away as soon as it presented itself. Didn't they know a last chance when it showed its face?

The lady spun in the direction of the sea suddenly, her face twisting for a moment into an expression of sorrow. Sawyer had seen a lot of liars in his life, but he still could not tell if what he was seeing there was real or just an elaborate show. "So I have an opening, then," she mused. "And who should it be given to, if not one of the people who set me free?"

"I ain't interested," Sawyer said quickly. His arm and his ankle jesusfuck _hurt_ all of the sudden, so that he had to grit his teeth hard. The words came out muffled and nearly unintelligible.

She smiled. "My choice. Not yours." The lady knelt down between his sprawled legs and, fuck it, if they weren't going to run, why the hell couldn't they intervene? She splayed her hand over his chest, warm and solid now rather than ephemeral as a good ghost's should be. Sawyer tried to knock her away, but it was like slapping an iron pipe. "I was going after the boy. So you might have given one back, after all. You just had the bad luck to give it to the wrong person. These things happen."

Sawyer was all kinds of flattered to hear that, he really was, but right now it was all that he could do to stay conscious. The lady dug her fingers into his chest, hard, and the pain that rolled out as the skin gave way was a hell of a lot more than he should have felt from a couple of puncture wounds. He smelled ozone and moss, growth and death. Though this could have been a result of the ferns that he reeled backwards into, Sawyer did not think so.

Someone yelled Sawyer's name, and then a shot rang out. He heard neither.

---

Jack heard Sawyer's voice long before he actually saw him and felt his steps quicken automatically, so that Kate was almost jogging in order to keep up. He was going to kiss him, and he was going to yell at him also, and then everything would be all right. That was how the story would end.

When Jack stumbled out of the trees and saw instead that Sawyer was sprawled out across the ground, seemingly unconscious and with the strange woman from the waves crouched over him like a feeding spider, he thought that his own heart was going to stop in his chest. "Sawyer!" he yelled without thinking, already drawing the gun.

The woman looked up at him, grinning, and ticked her index finger slowly back and forth in an uh-uh-uh gesture. Her hair and clothes were dry as bone even though he could feel his own shirt clinging clammily to his back. Her teeth seemed to elongate even as Jack watched, and the fingers that were submerged to the first knuckle in the skin above Sawyer's heart twisted. Jack had whipped the gun up and fired it before he even had time to think about it.

A neat hole opened up, bloodless, in the skin of the woman's forehead as the bullet passed through it. Rather than toppling over, however, she continued to give Jack her bright-eyed, almost radioactive stare. Jack's breath hitched in his chest, and he only barely stopped himself from throwing himself at her and ripping her away from Sawyer with his bare hands. Only the realization that he might hurt Sawyer more in the process halted him, and he felt the first tang of acrid panic in the back of his throat. "Get away from him," he ordered, striding forward anyway with the gun extended in front of him.

The amused twinkle in the woman's eyes grew even brighter. Jack felt a sudden urge to put a bullet through one of them and see how well she healed from _that_. "You took one from me," she said, "and now he's got to give it back. Everyone's settling their debts today."

Took one…Locke. Jack glanced down at Sawyer as a great suspicion took life in his mind. The prickliness, the issue with the inhalers weeks previously, the all-around _Sawyerness_ of him…and Jack did not care. "Get back," he ordered again, still coming closer. "If he belongs to anyone, then he belongs to himself." 'And to me.' That was a thought to mull and obsess over at a later date. Jack's finger came very close to pulling the trigger again.

"And to you," the woman said, so close to reading his thoughts that Jack's _did_ pull, sending a bullet wild and into the dirt. "Would you trade them to protect him, then?" she went on, changing tactics as abruptly as a child switching from one toy to another. "Fine. I'll trade you. Him for them. Does that make it fair now?"

Jack froze for one moment and one moment only with indecision before he said, in a voice that didn't shake for so much as a second, "That line of argument might have worked on him out there, you conniving bitch, but it doesn't work here. I'll protect them-I'll protect _all_ of them-and I'll fight you into the ground if you try to take even so much as one. No deals, no compromises." 'I'll learn to.' "If the Others held you prisoner for that long, then we can find a way to do it, too."

It was a mistake as soon as the words were out of his mouth. A moment of fear flashed in the woman's eyes, more real than any emotion that she had shown so far and to be treasured, before it was overshadowed by a bright and blazing triumph. "Will you do what they did, Jack?" she cooed. He hated that she knew his name. The woman glanced over her shoulder, her expression for a moment becoming ambiguous, but when Jack followed her gaze all he saw were Michael, Charlie, and Walt. "Will you go that far?"

Jack grit his teeth and barely managed to hold back the long stream of obscenities that wanted to flow past his lips. 'I'll fight every single one of them.' Sacrificing one for one might be better than sacrificing one for many, but that still wasn't a choice that he was going to make. Not if he wanted to call himself a leader, maybe, finally, not if he wanted to call himself a man worth being in the company of people in the first place, not if he wanted to continue to look at his own reflection. As far as options went, that didn't leave a whole lot, save for one. Jack opened his mouth to make the own trade that he could make and that he had come very close to making for Boone, when he was cut off.

"I'll fight you." The sound of Walt's voice made them all jump. He had been so still and pale, it was hard to remember that he was not a ghost himself. Some of the color flowed into his face as he stared at the woman with old, adult anger. "I know how, and I'll fight you until you're dead if you don't let my friend go. I can do it." The woman stared at Walt for a long, long moment, defiance written across her face. Walt's brow wrinkled, and the woman's solidity dimmed for a moment until she came very close to resembling the girl in white from the corridor. Jack did not know how many ghosts were really walking this island and did not care, so long as Sawyer did not become one of them. The woman pulled her lips back as Walt went on calmly, "Give him back and go away, or I'll do it."

"I control this island," the woman gritted at Walt. "This is my place."

"Not anymore," Walt said.

The lady let out a banshee's shriek and _flowed_, moving away from Sawyer and upwards into the air, becoming a trick of light and shadow that resembled a glowing green mouth and made Jack's heart pause for a moment before it dissipated into a cloud of particles that smelled strongly of rot. Jack was darting forward and kneeling by Sawyer's side before they could fade away and so drew some of them down into his throat; they were cold. He checked Sawyer's pulse with one hand and found it strong, while his other hand moved to apply pressure to the five oozing puncture wounds that had been punched into the flesh. Kate settled down on one side of him, Walt on the other.

"Thank you, Walt," Jack said, reaching out and hugging Walt swiftly to him, feeling the knee-weakening surge of gratitude that Sawyer for the moment could not.

"I didn't kill her," Walt said. "But it's my choice now if I want to. That's different than…what they wanted to do."

"I know," Jack answered. "You did the right thing."

"She's bad."

"I know that, too. We'll fight her when she tries again." It wasn't a matter of 'if', Jack thought. Probably wasn't even a matter of winning or losing, but of hanging on and holding their ground until the day when the real rescue boat came over the horizon. 'How much faith do you have?'

Jack checked Sawyer's pulse again. Though Sawyer did not wake, his eyelids fluttered and he turned, very slightly, towards Jack's hand.

End Part Twenty-Four


	25. Chapter 25

Part Twenty-Five

Part of Sawyer clung to his place in the caves with all of his might, and the other part of him drifted wherever it wanted. He visited dark caverns where there were bodies that had yet to be discovered, he visited huddles of Others terrified-'They should be, Sawyer thought grimly, in a voice that echoed from without almost as much as from within-now that their cross and host against the vampire had been taken away. He drifted to the tops of the trees and down into the very core of the volcano from which the island had been born, and always the lady was there. She was angry and spiteful now that her cajoling mask had been ripped away, but she never drew close enough to him to attack again. Scared of the little man, maybe, who had power the likes of which Sawyer doubted she had ever seen before. Scared that if she killed all of them she would be left here by her lonesome to stew in her own juices until the next plane fell out of the sky. Sawyer had read a book once about gods who quietly faded away once all of their worshippers had disappeared. Would that the bitch would take that same hint.

"You can't kill me," she said to sawyer as he bent to examine a cluster of blood-red orchids. Beneath them was a grave, over two centuries old. Sawyer was sure that the orchids were a coincidence. Right. "I _am_ the island. We can't exist without each other. Kill me, and you kill yourselves, too."

"Baby," Sawyer said, barely bothering to glance at her, "that is exactly what the human race is good at." He paused long enough to give her a razor-diamond smile. "But don't you worry your pretty little head. That won't be something worth thinking about until we all set foot on that rescue boat."

She wrinkled her lips back form her teeth and growled at him like a dog, but disappeared without staying to issue any further threats, some of which she was good enough to make sound like love letters. The little man must be coming to visit. His presence was different now, glowing with some sort of inner power that he had not learned how to harness before. If Sawyer could feel it even in the depths of unconsciousness, then he imagined that it must be close to bursting the wannabe goddess's eardrums.

Sawyer shifted and drifted awake again some time later as he felt hands moving over his abdomen, steady and sure, hands that he had not had the chance to get acquainted with outside of their professional capacities nearly as much as he would like. "Hey, Doc," Sawyer sighed, opening his eyes. His head felt fuzzy and thick. Lord only knew what Sun was pouring down his throat to keep him quiet. "Am I getting a conjugal?"

"You're not in prison, Sawyer." Jack paused in fussing the dressings that bound Sawyer's ribs. "You maybe ought to be for your own good, but you're not." Jack even looked different. Sawyer thought at first glance that he looked older, but that wasn't quite right. He looked sharper, fitter, closer to the actual images of King Arthur now, rather than someone who was desperately trying to cram himself into the mold. It was time for Sun to cut back on her dream juice, Sawyer decided, because he had come very close to saying that last part out loud.

"Sure I am," Sawyer grumbled instead, for a few seconds realizing that he was unable to look Jack in the eye. "Can't go nowhere, crappy food, mean warden. Hell, if I was in prison, at least I'd probably be getting laid."

Jack rolled his eyes, his annoyance shot through with an affection that Sawyer was not used to seeing there, that even scared him a little bit when he paused to think about it. Jack leaned over and, cupping Sawyer's jaw, gave him one of the deepest and most thorough kisses of his life. He wasn't the only one more than just a touch nervous about wandering around in brand new territory, Sawyer realized, but he didn't see anyone trying to beat strides to the door. He arced his head further into Jack as Jack's tongue pushed into his mouth, as he realized that he had Jack's specific taste memorized by heart and that furthermore he liked it.

"Think you're developing a fetish for this infirmary," Sawyer said when they parted for a moment, their foreheads resting against one another. "Unless it's something you brought with you that you've just been waiting to share with the class."

"Hate to break it to you, Sawyer," Jack said, not sounding nearly regretful enough, "but you're not getting laid today." He grinned when he saw Sawyer's outraged look. "No. Not after all I did to put you back together, I'm not going to let you go and get broken again." The thread of fear, faint but unmistakable, was back in Jack's voice. Sawyer wondered how many bedside vigils he had missed while he was completing his unconscious wanderings of the lady's stomping grounds.

Sawyer gave Jack another glare. "I hate you."

"No, you don't. I'm not sure what you 'do' me-" Jack kissed Sawyer again to cut off the sound of his snicker. "But you don't hate me."

"Give me more motivation like this and I'll bet that I can work my way up to it."

Jack snorted before he kissed Sawyer again, long and slow. "You idiot," he whispered against Sawyer's mouth, "why couldn't you have told me?"

"Wasn't sure I wasn't just going out of my mind," Sawyer whispered back. He bit at Jack's lower lip. "Still not, but I like it." He thought that Jack looked tired again, worried. Heavy was the head. "Shh, don't you go worrying about her, Jack. She's gonna lick her wounds for a while first. Must be embarrassing, backing down to a kid two hours after finally being set free."

"I worry," Jack said, which had to be the biggest understatement in the world, "that she's still going to come after you."

"Nah," Sawyer said, settling further back into the bedding as his short stores of energy told him that that was that. "Now while you're all ready to gallop into battle for my honor." Oh, he was _definitely_ going to have that talk with Sun. "You're here now. She'll keep her distance." Sawyer didn't hear a trace of doubt in his voice as his eyes slipped shut again, conviction that he hadn't felt since he was a little boy peeking into hymnals.

The lady didn't come anywhere near him as he continued to dream.

---

They didn't come to the beach often any longer, except to add wood to and stand watch over the signal fire, to fire and to collect salt for their experiments in preserving meat. They buried their dead on the same hill where they had buried Boone and Scott, so that the fallen would be the first to see the rescue ship that would someday slip over the horizon. They kept their cemetery carefully tended. Beyond that, the beach had quickly returned to its original state of wildness over the course of the two weeks since they had abandoned it. There was a force out there that must be very happy to take her territory back, Jack imagined, but he preferred not to think about that too much.

He liked to think about other things here, though. It was quiet.

Jack sat on the sand just a few yards beyond the reach of the waves, his arms folded over the tops of his knees as he watched them roll in. Footsteps shuffled through the sand behind him. "Tell me that you didn't walk all the way down here by yourself."

There was an annoyed huff of air, and then Sawyer was settling himself gingerly down on the sand beside Jack, obviously wanting to flop but still leery of moving too quickly. Jack put his hand out to steady him and got an irritated face in return. Given that Jack counted himself lucky every day that Sawyer had not rebroken his ribs badly enough to puncture a lung during their adventures on the night that Walt was rescued, he could just deal with that.

Sawyer braced himself on his elbows and stared out at the sea in a perfect mimicry of the way that Jack had been doing only a few moments before. "Easy there, cowboy," he drawled, picking up a handful of sand and letting it trickle back through his fingers. "I have a chaperone." Sawyer jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

Jack turned his head and saw a female figure standing among the trees, staying far enough back so that they could have privacy. At this distance Jack could not tell if it was Sun, who had all but turned into a ghost herself and was frequently seen with her hands splayed across the width of her belly, or Kate.

Sawyer jostled against Jack's shoulder with his own to draw his attention back and received a glare in return. "You still shouldn't have come this far. Not yet." Sawyer was still pale and thinner than he had been before being shot, and the stubble on his cheeks and chin stood out sharply against the stubble there. Jack threw some sand Sawyer's way, interrupting the pile that Sawyer had been playing with.

Sawyer snorted and leaned back even further onto his elbows so that he could catch the last rays of the setting sun on his face. "Hell, Jack, I ain't worn out," he said, leering. "You want to do something about that, step right up."

That right there was an invitation if Jack had ever heard one. He fisted his hand in the front of Sawyer's shirt and dragged him over, quickly enough to draw a startled noise from Sawyer's mouth. Jack cut it off quickly by kissing Sawyer hard enough to make their teeth clack against each other, hard enough to hurt, and neither one of them even thought about pulling away. There hadn't been nearly enough time for this, not nearly enough. Jack didn't ever want to think about ghosts, or psychic children, or deals made in the dark corners of the island ever again. Let someone else take that mantle of leadership and do with it whatever they liked; all Jack wanted was this. One night stand-right.

"C'mere," Jack muttered into Sawyer's mouth, cupping both sides of his face so that he could not even thinking about moving back. As if Sawyer was even trying, rather than climbing half on top of him and making small sounds from the back of his throat suggesting that he would climb down inside Jack if he could manage it. "C'mere, c'mere, c'mere, not ready to let you go yet."

"I'm not running, am I?" Sawyer muttered back. His hand moved down to the front of Jack's jeans, palming small circles that left Jack hissing through his teeth before Sawyer even drew the zipper down. He came minutes later beneath Sawyer's ministrations, and Sawyer was laughing quietly, soft and breathy. Jack already loved that sound.

He loved even more the short huffing noise that Sawyer made when Jack caught his breath again and moved downward, hovering over the zipper of Sawyer's jeans. Sawyer made a strained sound from between his teeth as Jack took him in his mouth, gripping the back of Jack's neck and muttering his name over and over again, like a prayer. Jack took that to mean that he was doing something right. He massaged Sawyer's thigh when Sawyer eventually came and lifted his head.

Sawyer looked vaguely dazed. "Huh," he said. The dazed look grew even deeper when Jack darted his tongue out and licked at his lower lip. "Okay, so I'm guessing that we don't have to worry about the infirmary fetish, then."

"Not yet," Jack said. "But we'll get around to it." He felt like grinning, even with the oppressive crush of green at his back. He felt like fighting. Jack raised himself up on his arms and crawled up Sawyer's length, pausing to kiss him hard. Sawyer groaned as he thrust his tongue into Jack's mouth, tasted himself there. That dazed look wasn't going to be going away anytime soon.

"You promised me that you would tell me everything," Jack said at last, pulling away.

Sawyer made an annoyed sound and blew out his cheeks, shaking his hair out of his eyes. Jack took a deep breath and reminded himself to stay the course. "You're a real hit with the ladies, aren't you? Bet they eat that banter right up."

"Sawyer," Jack said. Something in his voice made Sawyer look up quickly. He held Jack's gaze for a long moment, searching for something and then measuring it when he found it.

"You know as much as I do at this point, Jack," Sawyer said. He made no move to get out from under Jack, but tension coiled through his farm all the same.

"I…" Jack had been going through the notes from the boat and the ones that Shannon had brought back from the Others' tunnels, watching as they had shifted from neat experimental records into a catalogue of madness, and he didn't like anything that he saw there. "Just tell me that I'm not nuts."

Sawyer snorted out a faint laugh. "Been there, done that. If you are, then you're in good company." He paused for a long moment. "I was born in Tennessee," he finally said in a low voice, "but I spent a few years in Louisiana when I was a teenager." He cut his eyes towards Jack, almost as if he was daring him to push. Jack remained silent. "There are a few places there where you can still find voodoo, or at least the people who believe in it, but most of that shit's fake, for the tourists." Sawyer paused and reached out to fiddle with the sand again. "But my Grams, though, she was the real deal. Talked about ha'ants, covering mirrors during a storm, smearing olive oil over all the doors and windows in a new house. All of it." Sawyer looked up into Jack's face again. "I'm only telling you this so that you know that I'm not taking anything for granted now, but nobody's talking to me any longer."

"Because you gave one back." It was the first mention, oblique or otherwise, that Jack had given to indicate that he knew.

For a moment, Sawyer looked almost green. "Yeah," he said cautiously. "Guess I did."

"Good." Jack squeezed at Sawyer's shoulder for a moment and rolled to the side as Sawyer put himself away. "You didn't come all the way out there because you were horny." Sawyer's grin almost got sand thrown at him again.

"Sure I did," Sawyer said, his lips lifting. The darkness was not quite so swift to leave his eyes, but it, too, eventually began to make its exit. "Got what I wanted, didn't I?" Jack looked at him. "Actually, I came to tell you that you're going to miss the vote if you stay out here too much longer. The fact that you got horny, too, was just a bonus." Sawyer paused and added, "I think Hurley might take it from you."

"Think I might let him."

"Charlie doesn't have a chance in hell."

Jack hesitated for a moment before he said heavily, "Good." The scab on Charlie's forehead had healed into a bright pink weal of scar tissue, like a third eye, and he spent almost as much time alone as Walt did. Few people wanted to be around him for long. Sawyer had taken one look at Charlie's head after Sun had begun to scale back the strength of her teas, announced that "the bitch" had him, and refused to say any more on the subject.

Sawyer was right; they need to get back and do their part in getting this fledgling democracy off of the ground. Maybe Jack would be the leader when it was all said and done and maybe Hurley would, but either way there would still be work to do. More and more of the new sentries had reported seeing young people in groups of two or three, watching the camp. If it was Paul and he meant peace, then they would deal with that. If they meant otherwise…they would deal with that, too. Whether he did so as a leader or as an advisor to Hurley, there needed to be a system in place.

For now, though, all that he needed was the sunset.

---

There was a new knight now, as there must be. He understood this, as he understood now why the lady had so little time for him. As he had sought to understand before, so he sought to understand now, more like science than Jack would ever admit. Understand the island, so rich and alive that he didn't think that the lady herself realized what she was connected to. He could roam for ages, for eternities, and still not see everything that there was to see. At long last, he had found a way to _understand_.

Even now, John Locke was not a spiritual man.

End


End file.
